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Comment by stnvh | Hacker News Reader

Try running two instances of Firefox in parallel with different profiles, then do a normal quit / close operation on one after any use. Demons exist here.

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Describe "demons"?

I run four Firefox instances simultaneously, most of the time. No issues to report.

Long hangs / never closes, crash report screen triggers often. macOS. This occurs for me when launching instances from the about:profiles page and using each instance for what I'd describe as normal use

I see. Yeah, I've seen this.

It seems more likely to happen when the profile has been running for a long time (a couple weeks?) and/or using a large amount of RAM.

There's a 60-secish timeout before it gives up and pops that crash report window. I don't think it's a crash per se, just an unresolved file lock or similar. I haven't noticed whether there's any relationship to running multiple profiles. I am almost always running several at a time, and the issue only occurs sometimes. It has no (other) negative side effects, as far as I can tell, but it was unsettling at first.

I'm on macOS also, and I launch from the command line (effectively, I actually have separate launchers for each profile, but they just run a shell script with different arguments).

Same, also on macOS. My "personal" firefox profile on my work Macbook Pro, which I use for occasional gmail, HN, wikipedia, and pretty much nothing else, has crashed twice in the last 6 weeks - both times when shutting down to update the OS.

Honestly, I've been blaming MacOS for it since other apps also crashed at the same time (the first time it was Microsoft Intune, the second time it was Slack - I doubt either uses Firefox internally). I don't recall seeing a Firefox crash on my personal laptop running Linux at any point in the past few years.

I don't think "crash" is the right word for the Firefox behaviour. Yes it does pop a window that calls itself a "crash reporter", but in my observation it's a shutdown timer timeout that expires after ~60secs.

My guess is that it's trying to obtain or release a filesystem lock, possibly one that it's lost track of in some trivial way.

I've never seen any damage or inconsistencies in the resulting environment. So I don't think it's a dramatic event, just a safety timer that isn't resolved correctly.

Probably a simple, dumb, but harmless bug.

Yes, you're right - the tabs restored fine afterwards and the restart was only delayed for a minute or so, so it was barely even a minor inconvenience.

Contrast that with the dreadful corporate-supplied Edge AI browser I have to use for one client, which seems to randomly close windows without being asked, and never seems to be able to restore them.

Reassuring to hear I'm not the only one, and would consider this a normal use case for the browser, in fact one of the main reasons I use Firefox over chrome as it's simpler to manage than the latter.

I was hinting in my original comment if these cases are contributing to crash reports in any capacity there is a small chance they could be misattributed towards the claims in the post, especially if memory is not freed correctly on shutdown. Even more so if any memory allocation is shared between processes / helpers.

If I quit normally, don't wait for the "timeout" and force quit I still get the crash report UI immediately which suggests to me something funky going on.

10% is a crazy high percentage to claim for bitflips.

What is your expected behaviour?

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