title: Source of Firefox Crashes link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/source-of-firefox-crashes/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 577 created: 2008/01/21 13:58:56 created_gmt: 2008/01/21 13:58:56 comment_status: open post_name: source-of-firefox-crashes status: publish post_type: post

Source of Firefox Crashes

Just looking over recent errata up on Red Hat, I think I’ve identified this as the security update that introduced the crash-bugginess I’ve been experiencing. Apparently it’s meant to squash some bugs that potentially would let a malicious web page crash the browser/execute code as the user. Ironic, how such a bug fix would result in my browser now becoming unstable. Of course the same fix exists in any recent version of the browser, including the current 2.0 series, so installing that won’t help.

This thread on one of the CentOS lists shows that I’m not alone. One of the suggestions there is to go to Firefox 3 Beta because people have noticed the same problem under Firefox 2 (as I did). I’m going to try installing Firefox 3 and see if that solves the problem. Of course it may well be that the particular bugginess that’s infected 1.5 and 2.0 just hasn’t reached the 3.0 codebase yet, so this may only be a temporary fix.

As one poster put it, “This is beginning to be a bit unnerving.”

Update: I’ve installed Firefox 3 from the tar.bz2 file available over at Mozilla, and so far no crashes in any of the “usual places”. I used the same procedure as when I installed Firefox 2 earlier.

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