Crashing on startup
Hi I'm having some issues currently with my Firefox v. 25.0.1. As soon as I start the browser up, it tries to load the restore session page from the previous crash. Pretty much before the page could fully load Firefox would crash.
I have tried to create a new profile and the new profile seems to work just fine but as soon as I try to copy the sessionstore files from the crashing profile to the new profile, the same thing would happen. From time to time I would be able to get the browser working but that's maybe once in 25 or so attempts where it actually loads up correctly for me to restore my past sessions.
All Replies (11)
If you have a good idea of which tab is causing the problem, I have a workaround that will allow you to use the old sessionstore.js file: turn off the automatic restore and have Firefox display the list of windows and tabs so you can opt out of those you do not want to reload. Here's how.
In your new profile:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box in that tab, type or paste sess and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes and change the 1 to a 0 (a zero) and OK that.
(4) You can close this tab now.
In your old profile:
With Firefox closed, you could introduce this preference by adding a line to your prefs.js file:
user_pref("browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes", 0);
prefs.js is a plain text file, but to access it you need to open a hidden folder. You can paste this into the Start menu search box and press Enter to get there:
%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
Click into your old profile.
If Windows shows the file name prefs instead of prefs.js, you might want to unhide file extensions. This article has the steps: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/865219.
When editing any .js file, make sure to right-click and "Open With"; double-clicking typically will cause Windows to attempt to execute the file, which is seldom what you want to happen.
Any luck?
I tried changing it to 0 but it is still doing the same thing. As long as its that particular sessionstore in the profile whether if it's a new profile or not, over 90% of the time firefox will crash as soon as it starts up. Some times with that particular profile, even exiting firefox will cause it to crash.
Hi Cyphus, do you mean that you never even get the choice to only partially restore your session? In that case, maybe the file is corrupted...
I forgot to ask: can you post some of the crash IDs for recent crashes to see whether they point to a specific problem? This article describes how to locate those crash IDs so you can post them here (either the numbers starting with bp- or the links to the crash-stats server): Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly).
Nope it doesn't even get to that point. The corruption might be it but the weird thing is, if I have enough patience to try to restart firefox over and over again, from time to time it will successfully get to the page for me to restore my session and go back to doing whatever I was doing until firefox decides to crash again. That would be really random sometimes it would be up for hours before crashing, sometimes days or even weeks.
Recent: Crash ID: bp-31169281-83b5-4995-9c13-f0c952131208 Crash ID: bp-25fb582b-fb24-4e8a-a674-c1fd32131208 Crash ID: bp-d45c721c-787d-4a58-82d1-3bb2a2131208 Crash ID: bp-c39163b2-aed7-429b-ba4a-8ba472131208 Crash ID: bp-d7a5a560-7c30-4e02-8324-bc40f2131208
From a little bit further back: Crash ID: bp-654853f2-c1ca-424f-b147-119ce2131202 Crash ID: bp-a3a36edf-db94-4d95-9472-3e8592131202 Crash ID: bp-04d3a3c9-72be-4de5-8953-96ea02131202
Thanks for the help I really appreciate it.
That is a memory allocation (OOM) problem where Firefox runs out memory and can't create a block that is large enough.
How large is the sessionstore.js file?
If the crashes only occur with this specific file then best would be to use other means to extract links from it.
You can look at post(s) in this MozillaZine forum thread about extracting URLs from a sessionstore.js file.
Thanks for your help cor-el. My sessionstore.js file is 38,205KB. Do you know about how large can a sessionstore.js file can be before this error occurs?
Sorry, I don't know how large the file has to be to cause such issues, but 35 MB is quite large.
Sounds that you had a lot of tabs and windows open and maybe also a large tab history with closed tabs and windows.
It will be difficult to extract links from such a file because text editors might big problems with such a large file that doesn't have any line breaks.
Yes I realized that my sessionstore files is quite large as well. Though I am a bit surprised that this would cause FireFox to crash as in the past (probably a year or so ago) I would have sessionstore files up to 77MB in size yet not have any problems still.
Though I have tried to close down some tabs that I no longer need, but it seems like at times, FireFox doesn't seem to always update the sessionstore file properly. For instance, I would close out of a bunch of tabs and if FireFox crashes later on for some reason or another, the majority of the tabs that I have closed is still there and a bunch of websites that I was on previously wasn't saved for recovery. This includes me unchecking certain tabs from the "restore session" page. If firefox crashes later on the web pages I had unchecked for recovery pops right back up.
I know that's a separate issue altogether but do you have any idea as to why this might be? Thanks.