
MacOS 26 Spotlight usage crashes Firefox when summoned
Ran into an interesting bug with Firefox since installing the macOS26 Dev beta. Whenever I use command space to bring up spotlight, Firefox become unresponsive, the beach ball will spin. It will only happen if Firefox is in focus when I use spotlight, and only if I am signed into Firefox sync.
I am not sure of a way to help replicate this issue as it seems to only happen when signed with Sync, but I would be happy to provide additional if I can.
Chosen solution
In case anyone else has this problem: For me it was caused by syncing my bookmarks only. The root cause in this case was a corrupt or recursive bookmark folder structure: - A parent folder somehow contained itself (or another ancestor folder) as a subfolder. - When Spotlight/ShareKit tried to index or query bookmarks through LaunchServices, it would enter an infinite loop resolving folder hierarchies. - This caused Firefox to loop endlessly, consuming RAM until macOS killed it or froze.
The system logs showed repeated PlugInKit / ShareKit / CFURLResolveBookmarkData messages, confirming Spotlight/LaunchServices were stuck trying to resolve bookmark entries.
In short I cleared some bookmarks in the folder "More bookmarks" (or a similar name, my firefox is german) that had gear icons or no icons at all that were pretty much referring to other bookmark folders and thus repeating themselves within the bookmarks structure.
Hope this helps and is understandable.
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Hello,
Thank you for your message. We would greatly appreciate reporting this bug on Bugzilla. Please make sure to include all the details you have at the moment, and check "Include your browser's user agent string..."
If you feel comfortable enough to do that, please post a link to your bug report here. If not, just let me know, and I'll feel the report for you.
Modified
Chosen Solution
In case anyone else has this problem: For me it was caused by syncing my bookmarks only. The root cause in this case was a corrupt or recursive bookmark folder structure: - A parent folder somehow contained itself (or another ancestor folder) as a subfolder. - When Spotlight/ShareKit tried to index or query bookmarks through LaunchServices, it would enter an infinite loop resolving folder hierarchies. - This caused Firefox to loop endlessly, consuming RAM until macOS killed it or froze.
The system logs showed repeated PlugInKit / ShareKit / CFURLResolveBookmarkData messages, confirming Spotlight/LaunchServices were stuck trying to resolve bookmark entries.
In short I cleared some bookmarks in the folder "More bookmarks" (or a similar name, my firefox is german) that had gear icons or no icons at all that were pretty much referring to other bookmark folders and thus repeating themselves within the bookmarks structure.
Hope this helps and is understandable.
Thank you @Wicker that was 100% the issue for me. I some how had put the "toolbar bookmark" folder on the toolbar and would do bookmark inception. Backed up my favorites just to be safe and deleted the link on the toolbar and can use spotlight again.