Firefox frozen and unresponsive when a notification is received
Since a few days, Firefox started crashing each time I receive a notification.
For example, with this notifications test website: https://www.bennish.net/web-notifications.html
Each time I click on the "Show" button to display a notification, Firefox becomes completely unresponsive: the content of the window is completely frozen and I can't click on anything. I must close it and restart it to make it work again. When I restart it, a dialog displays:
> Firefox is already running, but is not responding. The old Firefox process must be closed to open a new window.
In both applications, the notification is never shown: the freeze occurs before.
I tried the following changes but they did not stop the issue from occuring:
- Deactivating hardware acceleration - Troubleshooting mode - Deactivating firefox notifications in Windows - Deactivating `alerts.useSystemBackend` and `alerts.useSystemBackend.windows.notificationserver.enabled` in `about:config`
At the same time, I noticed that Thunderbird (v144.0.1, 64bits) started having the same issue. It haappens each time I receive a new message in the background and a notification should appear. Maybe this is related?
All Replies (2)
I forgot to add that I'm on Windows 11 25H2 (OS build 26200.6901), which is the latest (non-preview) version available to me at the time of this writing.
Firefox sometimes doesn't shut down in a reasonable amount of time. If you notice it lingering in the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) for over a minute or two, you can "kill" it using right-click > End Task (or End Process, depending on which panel you're viewing).
Regarding the notifications, Firefox normally sends notifications to the Windows Action Center (or whatever they call it now). Could yours have been customized? I don't know whether that would make any difference, but just in case, here's how to check/reset:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.
More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox. The moderators would like us to remind you that changes made through this back door aren't fully supported and aren't guaranteed to continue working in the future.
(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste alerts.useSystemBackend and pause while the list is filtered
(3) If the preference has a value of false, double-click it (or click the Toggle button or Reset button at the right end of the row) to restore the default value of true
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