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Firefox 26 causes kernel panic in Mac OS X 10.6.8 when viewing video

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Last December 2013 when viewing the video on this site: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/10534852/Tracking-Santa-Claus-with-NORAD-5-things-you-should-know.html

a kernel panic happened on my iMac running OS X10.6.8 "Snow Leopard". (1.83 GHz, 2GB RAM)

***This ONLY happened in Firefox 26 and the latest SeaMonkey, not in Chrome or Safari. This was discussed on a Mac Facebook Group, and it doesn't happen with older versions of Firefox, nor later models of Macs. This was brought up by another member of this FB Group, who has the exact same model iMac. I tested the site, and also got the kernel panic. ***

It was concluded that there is an issue with the iMac's graphics card and Gecko. I'm asking as I've had to suffer with Chrome for the past month and REALLY MISS Firefox, and wonder if you all know of this problem and can fix it with a later Firefox? Please?

Graphics info: ATI Radeon X1600:

 Chipset Model:	ATY,RadeonX1600
 Type:	GPU
 Bus:	PCIe
 PCIe Lane Width:	x16
 VRAM (Total):	128 MB
 Vendor:	ATI (0x1002)
 Device ID:	0x71c5
 Revision ID:	0x0000
 EFI Driver Version:	01.00.068
Last December 2013 when viewing the video on this site: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/10534852/Tracking-Santa-Claus-with-NORAD-5-things-you-should-know.html a kernel panic happened on my iMac running OS X10.6.8 "Snow Leopard". (1.83 GHz, 2GB RAM) <nowiki>***</nowiki>This ONLY happened in Firefox 26 and the latest SeaMonkey, not in Chrome or Safari. This was discussed on a Mac Facebook Group, and it doesn't happen with older versions of Firefox, nor later models of Macs. This was brought up by another member of this FB Group, who has the exact same model iMac. I tested the site, and also got the kernel panic. *** It was concluded that there is an issue with the iMac's graphics card and Gecko. I'm asking as I've had to suffer with Chrome for the past month and REALLY MISS Firefox, and wonder if you all know of this problem and can fix it with a later Firefox? Please? Graphics info: ATI Radeon X1600: Chipset Model: ATY,RadeonX1600 Type: GPU Bus: PCIe PCIe Lane Width: x16 VRAM (Total): 128 MB Vendor: ATI (0x1002) Device ID: 0x71c5 Revision ID: 0x0000 EFI Driver Version: 01.00.068

Modified by cor-el

All Replies (6)

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Hello paulcoholic,

Thanks for contacting Mozilla Support. I'm sorry that you were experiencing issues with the the Santa tracker, hopefully he made it to your house ok. :)

Do you remember what kind of content was presented on that page? It seems like they have switched it to a generic message since it's no longer in use. It would be good to know if it was flash or another piece of content.

In order to assist you better, please follow the steps below to provide us crash IDs to help us learn more about your crash.

  1. Enter about:crashes in the Firefox address bar and press Enter. A Submitted Crash Reports list will appear, similar to the one shown below.
  2. Copy the 5 most recent Report IDs that start with bp- and paste them into your response here.

SubmittedCrashReports-Win7

Thank you for your help!

More information and further troubleshooting steps can be found in the Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly) article.

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Hi patrick.

Unfortunately, the Crash Reporter doesn't show anything.

The video was just of the globe with Santa sailing around it. Couldn't really tell as almost immediately after the video started, the Mac kernel panicked.

I searched in the Group for the thread, and the conclusion is that Flash wasn't the culprit .

I may see if the other guy in the FB Group who initially reported it there is willing to come here and say what he knows.

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Does it help if you run Firefox in Safe Mode or with hardware acceleration disabled?

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Hi.

I am the other guy who initially came across this problem.

I can confirm it only does it in Firefox 26 on 2006 1.83Ghz Core Duo iMac running Snow Leopard. It doesn't do it Chrome or Safari.

I also tried it on my 2009 2Ghz MacBook runningn Snow Leopard and Firefox 26 and it worked fine as well as Mavericks and Firefox 26 on the same Mac.

Reverting back to Firefox 25 has resolved the issue on the iMac.

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Hardware acceleration wasn't checked.

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By "wasn't checked," I meant the box wasn't checked off, and so hardware acceleration was disabled. The iMac still panicked.