Firefox Question

Factual Questions
1

I’ve scanned the other threads related to Firefox and didn’t see this addressed, but apologies in advance if I’m being redundant.

I use Firefox on my laptop with no problems. I loaded it on my wife’s Dell Inspiron 600(I think) the other day. It ran with no problem for two days, then did something weird last night. She was browsing, then closed Firefox to do something in Word.

When she tried to re-open the browser she h=got a message that said the application was already open, and she should re-boot or close other versions of the appllication before attempting to run Firefox.

The second time she got message I took over, and ran Task Manager. There was no other version open or running. I logged out, and re-logged in and everything was fine. I tried getting the problem to duplicate, opening, and closing Firefox, but it didn’t re-occur.

What might have prompted this?

2

That’s why I don’t use Firefox. It has something to do with a problem called “memory leak.”

Here’s the only known workaround. And it’s solution is to shut down Firefox and restart, which does not always work.

I’ve been using Opera for several months now, and don’t notice that problem - yet. We’ll see.

3

When it said that another episdoe of Firefox was running, did it prompt with a profile page? Say something like ‘default profile is in use’ and ask you to create a new one? If so, its one of those infamous ‘known issues’ that nothing is been done about. Well maybe not nothing I vaguely remember hearing v1.5 of firefox fixes this problem. However in the situation I just described Firefox is always visible in the process tab of task manager. Did you look there? If not, next time do so, and end firefox.exe process. Then you can re-open firefox using the profile you normally do (with your bookmarks and stuff).

4

I didn’t look in Processes, but it wasn’t in Applications. i’ll check if it happens again.

It didn’t say anything about a default profile being in use though, just that Firefox was already running.

5

The applications tab is kind of useless in task manager. It is almost always quicker to kill the process then the application, and when strange things happen, its a good idea to make sure there is no program holding onto memory (the aformentioned memory leak by Rico). Most applications have easy to guess process names (outlook = outlook.exe, firefox = firefox.exe, word = winword.exe) however for ease never kill a process called ‘explorer.exe’. You will make your desktop disappear.

6

I knew that about explorer.exe. But I’ll check that Processes tab the next time, if there is one.

7

This may also happen in certain cases that have to do with a lock file that Firefox uses that is supposed to be deleted when you exit. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, so when you start it up again, it sees the file and thinks there is another instance of Firefox running. If you don’t think Firefox is running but you find the parent.lock file, delete it.

For more details, take a look here.

8

Firefox has been doing this for me a lot lately (more than before). For me, it seems to be whenever I close a window with a multimedia application loading (embedded Windows Media Player for example). Other open windows won’t be responsive to clicking on links, mouse scrolling breaks, etc.

After I close all of the windows, there is indeed still a FIREFOX.EXE in the processes tab. Kill that, and you will be able to re-open FF again. Darn memory leak.

'Tis annoying.