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Debilitating Freeze with Firefox

R

relbbircs

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 26, 2007
103
0
New Mac Pro 2.8, 14 Gigs of ram, running 10.5.2 fully updated.

With only Firefox and Mail open, Firefox froze on the NYT website. Spinning beachball on a broken pixelated background just around it. Cursor could move, but couldn't pick up anything.

Previously I've had problems with Firefox, due, I think, to it not being able to handle websites/advertizers delays when cookies are not automatically enabled (my guess, may be wrong). But previously when Firefox froze I could always mouse outside of it and force close the program.

This business of freezing completely with Firefox is new.

More doubts for me whether I did the right thing to upgrade to the new Mac Pro.
 
Don't worry, it will always be the right decision to upgrade to a mac pro, I use firefox, changed nothing it's as basic as it can be and there are no issues whatsoever, try taking it off and downloading again (don't think repairing permissions will help here) FF should :eek: work ok
 
relbbircs said:
New Mac Pro 2.8, 14 Gigs of ram, running 10.5.2 fully updated.

With only Firefox and Mail open, Firefox froze on the NYT website. Spinning beachball on a broken pixelated background just around it. Cursor could move, but couldn't pick up anything.

Previously I've had problems with Firefox, due, I think, to it not being able to handle websites/advertizers delays when cookies are not automatically enabled (my guess, may be wrong). But previously when Firefox froze I could always mouse outside of it and force close the program.

This business of freezing completely with Firefox is new.

More doubts for me whether I did the right thing to upgrade to the new Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Firefox always gives me trouble. I wouldn't judge the Mac Pro solely on it's performance.
 
relbbircs said:
New Mac Pro 2.8, 14 Gigs of ram, running 10.5.2 fully updated.

With only Firefox and Mail open, Firefox froze on the NYT website. Spinning beachball on a broken pixelated background just around it. Cursor could move, but couldn't pick up anything.
...

More doubts for me whether I did the right thing to upgrade to the new Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't blame the new Mac pro for this. I have had this problem several times over on my windows machines... sometimes when firefox is transferring data from some ad provider, it just freezes. Can't end task, can't "taskkill /f/ im firefox.exe", can't do anything. Of course I expected no less on Windows, but maybe FireFox is the culprit in your case as well, and not the mac?
 
This is less-so a Mac Pro specific problem, more so an OS X Firefox one. Firefox on OS X is, unfortunately, quite buggy. But it's a matter of finding the right (wrong?) websites in order to tickle the bugs in Firefox. I guarantee that more than 50% of the people reading this thread with Firefox will say, "but I have no problems with Firefox whatsoever!!" I can crash it fairly frequently, just by surfing to certain discussion forums I belong to.

Heck, just going to the Apple store off of http://store.apple.com can lock Firefox up from time to time.

The end user is, ultimately, challenged with choosing which browser sucks less: Safari or Firefox. In the end, I find that Firefox is more compatible with the various sites I browse. Even if it crashes more often. There are some sites that I go to (some internal to where I work, so I can't post their URLs for people to see...) that Safari just can't open. So, in the end, I stick with FF. Even if it IS a buggy PoS.

jas
 
OK -- this has happened to me a couple times now. I can understand that if Firefox is screwed up it might not work; what I can't understand is how OSX isn't able to prevent it from freezing the whole system.

That doesn't seem right to me.
 
relbbircs said:
New Mac Pro 2.8, 14 Gigs of ram, running 10.5.2 fully updated.

With only Firefox and Mail open, Firefox froze on the NYT website. Spinning beachball on a broken pixelated background just around it. Cursor could move, but couldn't pick up anything.
Click to expand...

It's not Firefox, or even your Mac Pro. It's your ATI HD 2600 graphics card. How did I know you have an ATI HD 2600? Because there are many people at the Apple discussion forums reporting similar lockups with this graphics card seemingly being the only common denominator.

I would recommend you start monitoring your system.log file (using the console app) and watch for any interesting kernel messages pertaining to your GPU. Post them here or at the Apple Mac Pro discussions.

Apple Support Duscussions - Using your Mac Pro:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1124
 
relbbircs said:
Interesting question -- I hadn't even thought of the potential problems but just used migration assistant last week, moving from a G5 to a new Mac Pro. Everything worked fine except for a couple sound setting. Soundflower, for example, didn't transfer and I had to reinstall it. And I had to reset preferences for screensaver and energy saver. Other than those I haven't noticed anything else yet (knock on wood).
Click to expand...

That's a quote from one of the other threads you've posted in, I wonder if the migration could be playing a part in all this? Which video card do you have?
 
I have the ATI card. Hmmm.... Maybe I should order the 8800GT?

mogrefy said:
That's a quote from one of the other threads you've posted in, I wonder if the migration could be playing a part in all this? Which video card do you have?
Click to expand...
 
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