Strange Crash - Possible Graphics Driver Related
Ever since upgrading to a Radeon HD7870, Firefox experiences crashes every now and then. Normally, I'd say this is an issue with the card, but it only happens in Firefox. Games run fine, movies run fine. Chrome and Opera run fine, but Firefox has issues.
The problem is that I have no idea what's causing it, though I want to say it has to do with Javascript since the vast majority of the time the issue occurs when I hover a link and very rarely when a page like Google updates.
As for what happens? My entire screen goes creamsicle orange (at least it's a pleasant color!). The operating system is still running it seems. Hard drive still blinks, music will still play in the background, but I can't actually do anything since my screen is orange. Only way I've been able to fix it is a hit the reset button on my case.
This has persisted through several versions, starting with 16 I think. I don't actually remember what version I was running when I upgraded to this card (the first few days of October, and I'm always up-to-date). It doesn't happen very often, maybe once every few days, but it's incredibly annoying.
Réiteach roghnaithe
This is fixed in the latest AMD Catalyst beta driver, per http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst1211betadriver.aspx
"Resolves a sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets."
That doesn't explain why I only encountered it with Firefox, but oh well. I contacted AMD and they say the symptoms matched the bug they fixed.
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First make sure you are running the most recent AMd Driver (http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx).
After doing that, open Firefox, type about:support into the address bar, press enter. Copy and paste the crash ID's (they start with bp-) here. We only need about the last 5.
I'm already running the latest Windows 8 drivers and there are no crash reports. I don't think Firefox itself is crashing, but something about it is crashing the graphics drivers.
Did you see if you can find any crash reports? Have you tried to disable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox? Turning off hardware acceleration
Yes, hardware acceleration is disabled. It was the first thing I tried, though because this issue happens so infrequently, I don't actually know if it solves anything yet.
Also, I followed the instructions you posted and there were no Crash IDs on that page, so I followed the link from there to about:crashes, which says, "No crash reports have been submitted."
Alright, then this is sounding more and more like a windows crash than a Firefox caused one. Since Hardware Acceleration is disabled this means that Firefox isn't utilizing your graphics card at all, and the absence of crash reports means this isn't Firefox failing. The fact that you have to restart your computer to get it working again also points to either a graphics issues (bad card, bad driver) or Windows issue. Try to contact either AMD support, or try a Windows support forum.
Réiteach Roghnaithe
This is fixed in the latest AMD Catalyst beta driver, per http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst1211betadriver.aspx
"Resolves a sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets."
That doesn't explain why I only encountered it with Firefox, but oh well. I contacted AMD and they say the symptoms matched the bug they fixed.