Crash Reporter not working anymore
Recent versions of Firefox have started crashing more and more often for me. As of version 80.0, it happens around 1–2 times a day on average, usually when the session has been running for a while. In the middle of work, Firefox window(s) will just disappear and the process is no longer running. This will happen both on my Windows 10 and my Windows 7 system.
I recently realised that I hadn't been seeing the Mozilla Crash Reporter window in a long time, on either system. I just assumed my crash reports were being sent in order to help fix these bugs, but today I decided to check, and saw that crash reports are not even generated anymore. When I oben about:crashes, I see that the last crash report is from May. I'm sure I've had Firefox crash many dozens of times since then, but the crash reporting facility seems to no longer work.
I tried running Firefox in Safe Mode as well. The result is the same: it will crash usually after a few hours of work, without any error, no crash reporter window, and no crash report showing up in about:crashes afterwards.
What could have broken my Crash Reporter functionality (and on both of my systems, too)? And how can I get it back to generating and submitting these reports?
Gekozen oplossing
Is there any info about these crashes in the Windows Event Viewer ?
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Type about:preferences#advanced<enter> in the address bar. Select Data Choices. Turn on Enable Crash Reporter.
Note: For Firefox v56+ its; about:preferences#privacy Under Firefox Data Collection turn on Allow Firefox To Send Crash Reports.
Thank you for the reply, FredMcD.
All checkboxes under Firefox Data Collection are ticked, on both of my machines. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the solution.
Given how the option is phrased, it also sounds like it would disable submitting crash reports to Mozilla, but that they would still be generated and stored locally. However, I'm not getting any new crash reports to show up in about:crashes in the first place.
Use these links to create a new profile. Use this new profile as is. Is the problem still there?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-run-firefox-when-profile-missing-inaccessible
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox#Navigating_to_the_profile_folder
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles
Type about:profiles<enter> in the address bar.
It took me a while to get back to this – I created a new profile, but I'm not using it for my everyday work, and since crashes are very sporadic it took me some time to confirm that it also happens with a fresh profile.
I can confirm that in Firefox 82.0.3 with a clean profile, I still get infrequent crashes that don't trigger the Crash Reporter window, nor show up in the crash report list on about:crashes.
My way of reproducing it was to just open a few tabs with different pages in Firefox (including YouTube videos, BBC radio player, some script-heavy news sites etc. to maximise chances of triggering whatever causes the crash), then leaving it open while I'm not using the computer for a few hours, e.g. over night. Occasionally when I come back to the computer, Firefox will no longer be running. On reopening, it successfully restores the tabs that were opened, but there is no crash report.
I will repeat this experiment with a clearly defined set of open pages, and try to reduce it to try and find out if a particular website is causing these crashes.
Gekozen oplossing
Is there any info about these crashes in the Windows Event Viewer ?
Make sure all software is up to date.
See if there are updates for your graphics drivers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/upgrade-graphics-drivers-use-hardware-acceleration
cor-el said
Is there any info about these crashes in the Windows Event Viewer ?
Good call, I forgot to check there, thank you! This almost certainly led me on the right track, and I'll consider this issue resolved as having been related to a third-party software (although the fact that Firefox crashes in a way not caught by the Crash Reporter might still be a problem?)
I found the application error log entries for the latest few Firefox crashes in Event Viewer. The firefox.exe crash logs themselves didn't seem to contain any helpful information apart from the cause having been a memory access violation in an unknown module. However, in each instance the crash log was preceded a few seconds earlier by two crashes of another application: Mirekusoft Install Monitor 4.2.991.2 (MimEng.exe). This is a system configuration change monitor that I had forgotten was still installed on these systems. In both cases it was running in an expired trial mode, so in theory shouldn't even have been doing anything anymore, but the service was still configured and running. I have uninstalled the application now. I will keep an eye out but am pretty confident that this will have solved the problem, the log sequence looked very telling indeed.
Thank you for the support!