Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Firefox crashes almost immediately on startup

501st_alpha1
501st_alpha1
more options

I haven't used my desktop computer in a few weeks, and before that everything worked fine.

Now when I try to start Firefox, it crashes almost immediately. Usually this is right after I restore the old session, but sometimes it will run for a few minutes or hours before crashing.

The crash occurs even in Safe Mode. I also tried closing all the tabs from my old session, but even with only one tab open it still crashes.

I'm on Debian Jessie, and I updated to the latest available Firefox after the crashes started, but that didn't help either.

Crash ID: bp-cac9ea19-8697-438b-8921-281251171020

I haven't used my desktop computer in a few weeks, and before that everything worked fine. Now when I try to start Firefox, it crashes almost immediately. Usually this is right after I restore the old session, but sometimes it will run for a few minutes or hours before crashing. The crash occurs even in Safe Mode. I also tried closing all the tabs from my old session, but even with only one tab open it still crashes. I'm on Debian Jessie, and I updated to the latest available Firefox after the crashes started, but that didn't help either. Crash ID: bp-cac9ea19-8697-438b-8921-281251171020

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

You can create a new profile to test if your current profile is causing the problem.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.

501st_alpha1
501st_alpha1 Question owner
more options

I haven't yet been able to reproduce the issue with a fresh profile, though I was able to reproduce it on a profile that I created a while ago that I don't use for anything else. (I keep all settings at the default, so the only thing that profile should have is some history entries.)

In addition to full browser crashes, I have also run into various tab crashes. Sometimes reloading the tab will cause it to crash again, but sometimes it loads fine.

Interestingly, I also had a couple crashes (both browser and tab) when using the Tor Browser Bundle, which AFAIK clears a lot of profile data between sessions. (TBB version 7.0.7, based on Firefox 52.4.1.)

After one of the TBB crashes, I saw an error that mentioned `free`, so I ran memtest86 to check for hardware issues with my RAM, but it found no errors.