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Why, when firefox crashes while computer is idle, I have to do a forced restart to get back on my computer.

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  • Last reply by sandi359

I have had this happen twice now in the last few days. My computer has been idle for an hour or so and when I come back, the only way I can get back on it by doing a forced shutdown and then restart the computer. When it is up and running again and I open up firefox, the two tabs that were open will still be open, these are my home page (Yahoo) and the other tab is my e-mail box. I think firefox is crashing and shutting down the system. I can not figure out why this is happening. Any suggestions?

I have had this happen twice now in the last few days. My computer has been idle for an hour or so and when I come back, the only way I can get back on it by doing a forced shutdown and then restart the computer. When it is up and running again and I open up firefox, the two tabs that were open will still be open, these are my home page (Yahoo) and the other tab is my e-mail box. I think firefox is crashing and shutting down the system. I can not figure out why this is happening. Any suggestions?

All Replies (2)

You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.

  • Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"

You need to close and restart Firefox after toggling this setting.


Your System Details List shows multiple Flash plugins.

  • Shockwave Flash 14.0 r0
  • Shockwave Flash 13.0 r0

You can find the installation path of all plugins on the about:plugins page.

You can check the Flash player installation folder for multiple Flash player plugins and remove older version(s) of the plugin (NPSWF32) and possibly (re)install the latest Flash player.

  • (32 bit Windows) C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash\
  • (64 bit Windows) C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\

Your System Details list shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize prefs each time Firefox starts.

The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created this file and normally it wouldn't be there. You can check its content with a plain text editor (right-click: Open with) if you didn't create this file yourself.

The user.js file is read each time Firefox is started and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.

You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder:

  • Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)

Note that Windows hides some file extensions by default. Among them are .html and .ini and .js and .txt, so you may only see file name without file extension. You can see the real file type (file extension) in the properties of the file via the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer.

I did not create the user.js file. Do I need to delete this file? I can see it, but I can not do anything to it. If I need to do something with it, how do I do this? I fixed the shockwave flash issue. Do I have to disable hardware acceleration or can I leave it, I never enabled it, that was the default and was always checked.