Hacker News Reader

Comment by xkarga00 | Hacker News Reader

This Firefox is already running bug is really annoying. I love Firefox but it's some poor UX when i manually have to shutdown the process.

View on HN

Normally, it has been fixed in Firefox 30. This one was difficult to find, as it was due to a sophisticated combination: 1. preferences setup to cleanup history on shutdown; 2. no new thumbnails created during the session; 3. some specific scheduling of shutdown.

I'm one of the devs who fixed it, btw.

Sweet. Good job!

Thanks so much.

I wonder why this only seems to be a problem for some people... It has happened to me only once in the 1000's of times I have shutdown Firefox since version 29.

But still once in 1000 times is worse than none, isn't it? And it has happened more than once for me...

Well, I have needed to manually shutdown the Firefox process prior to Firefox 29 (every once in a great while) so having to do it once so far with the new version is not significant.

I am not saying it's not a real issue but why it's more a problem for some then others...

OK, now after my previous comments I have had to manually shutdown Firefox twice today. It's a problem...

Yes, though in the same way that one yellow jacket is worse than none in the house. If you only have one every so often, you aren't that likely to hunt down every nest outside and around the house to kill them.

I know it happens to me because plugin-container never closes properly. The result is that the entire browser process stays open while the zombie plugin-container exists.

It happens for me more like five times a day. I am holding the rest of my machines on Firefox 28 till this is fixed. It is easier to cancel update message than to terminate the zombie process.

Each update up to Firefox 28 improved this issue somewhat; there's a small bug in 29 that made it worse again (not by much, statistically), and that bug is fixed in 30. So you can wait for the 30 update in 6 weeks, or you can move to the Beta channel (which is 30) until it hits Release.

(Personally, I run the Aurora channel - v31 right now on my machine - and I never have any problems.)

EDIT: Here's the relevant bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1006478 If that isn't your issue, definitely file a bug report!

Erm... this entire thread is about 30 hitting release... no need to wait 6 weeks.

In the meantime, I've noticed that it 'really quits' more often when using ctrl-q to exit firefox instead of closing the window.

Right, it should force-kill the existing process or something.

Well, it shouldn't do that automatically, as you might just genuinely try to run FF while it's running by mistake. But a button to do kill would be nice.

Running FF a second time works actually, all it does is signal to the current running FireFox to open a new window in the same process. The 'FF is already running' message comes-up when there is a zombie FF process going that's not responding to signals to open a window (or similar). I agree with you though, killing it off automatically isn't a very good solution, but having a button to close the current FF and restart would be nice.

If you click on the button/ launch the application it should make a best effort to show you a browser window. "Restore" a minimised window, raise a hidden window, offer to restart if necessary, etc..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com