Firefox crashes 100% of the time my late '16 MBP wakes from sleep

[blSwagger]

I'm a little annoyed that every time I wake my MBP (2.7/460/1tb) from sleep, I find that Firefox crashed. It happens 100% of the time. Sometimes I can't even submit a crash report because that had crashed as well. This was Mozilla's response to me: "hi, this may be a crash apparently related to new mac hardware. this has no fix yet, but is currently actively investigated by mozilla engineers in bug 1320048 - so you might want to follow along there as well..."

I wanted to switch over to Safari, but I couldn't deal with the lack of favicons. I've tried Chrome, but I prefer Firefox.

Does everyone else have this problem?

 

[__david__]

I'm a little annoyed that every time I wake my MBP (2.7/460/1tb) from sleep, I find that Firefox crashed. It happens 100% of the time. Does everyone else have this problem?

Yes, yes, 100% yes. It's getting really old, too. My Late 2016 15" MBP has all same configuration as my old laptop (I copied my whole home folder over to the new one). Firefox never crashed like this on the old computer.

Thunderbird is in the same boat. Actually I think Thunderbird is worse than Firefox. Thunderbird crashes nearly 100% of the time, while Firefox seems to crash only 75% of the time. Between the two of them at least one has crashed when I wake my computer up, and quite often the Mozilla Crash Reporter has also crashed, just for good measure.

It's kind of weird that new hardware is causing an app to crash like this. I suppose some API somewhere is returning something that Firefox/Thunderbird/Gecko doesn't expect.

 

[pgc17]

I'm having the same problem, with the exact same hardware configuration.. in the above listed bug report, one of the forum posts said that apple had fixed the issue in
10.12.3 Beta 2 (16D17a), so it looks like we will have to put up with it until 10.12.3 is released.

 

[ron1004]

The latest two FF revisions crash 20 or more times a day on my 2011 MBP, which led to me looking into other browsers.

 

[thesaint024]

Is this a 15" dGPU problem? I haven't noticed this on my 13" tb. I also don't use Firefox most of the time. I will keep an eye on it going forward.

 

[jun180]

Experiencing the same issue, very annoying!

 

[AppleSmack]

There are 6 comments before this one in this thread… does this mean that there are many more Firefox users out there, with the same configuration as OP, *without* these sleep/wake issues?

 

[blSwagger]

There are 6 comments before this one in this thread… does this mean that there are many more Firefox users out there, with the same configuration as OP, *without* these sleep/wake issues?

That's what I'm wondering... whether it's a widespread issue with Firefox on the new MBPs or if Firefox is not being used widespread.

 

[AppleSmack]

What I was hoping for was a bunch of Firefox users with the same hardware config to pipe up in here "hey, no problems with my Firefox!"

Otherwise, I suspect the few people with this problem must have a particular Firefox config (plugins and preferences) that doesn't play well with the new hardware.

 

[997440]

That's what I'm wondering... whether it's a widespread issue with Firefox on the new MBPs or if Firefox is not being used widespread.

Check out the comment section at the bug report linked in your OP. There's been some success reported of being able to avoid the crash by disabling Fx's relationship with the Mac's tb. One user did report success then failure. It appears it could be an SDK version issue.

The explanation in external links and the Terminal command to disable starts here (comment #38): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1320048#c38

 

[gtgrad95]

I am having the same issue. Crashes everytime the MBP comes out of sleep.

 

[Wildkraut]

Firefox crashes often everywhere, even on Windows.

 

[997440]

Firefox crashes often everywhere, even on Windows.

Maybe it has to do with your circumstances. I've used Fx for years in multiple OSes and it's never crashed.

 

[caddison]

Everyone's circumstances, etc, are different, but I used to be a diehard FireFox guy and eventually had to dump it because of constant issues I had working with Windows.

I use Chrome now on both Win and Mac when it comes to a third-party browser, but I tend to try to stick with browsers that are native to the OS whenever possible.

Differences between browsers used to be pretty dramatic, but I don't find that to be the case so much anymore, and native browsers always just seem to behave better.

Not saying you should switch to something else if you love FF, and it sucks you're dealing with issues... just offering my opinion.

 

[997440]

We should stick to the OP's issue and not get sidetracked, sorry for my part in that. Someone can start a new, favorite browser or how to, thread.

 

[LaFrentz]

Glad I found this thread. Firefox running on my late 2016 MBP 15" 2.6/460/512 is crashing about 75% when waking from sleep. For some reasons I had to install Thunderbird as additional mail client which crashes even more often when waking from sleep. No other software shows this behaviour. I have also not experienced any graphic issues so far. Hope Mozilla gets this sorted out soon. It's really annoying.

 

[curmudgeonette]

I had to install Thunderbird as additional mail client which crashes even more often when waking from sleep. [...] Hope Mozilla gets this sorted out soon. It's really annoying.

This is an Apple bug, deep in Apple's code.

The reason that Mozilla products are affected is that Mozilla intentionally fills unused memory with values that cause crashes. This helps find bugs involving stray memory references. In this case, it's found an Apple bug. Apparently, Apple's testing department doesn't test with Mozilla software...

 

[bartvk]

Edit:
The solution below is totally overkill. There's a terminal command to avoid this, see message above.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1320048#c38

--- Old message ---
To remedy this situation, I've created a Hammerspoon script to kill Firefox when the system goes to sleep, and start it upon waking. In Firefox Preferences -> General, you can configure a setting called "When Firefox starts". Set this to "Show my windows and tabs from last time". Then install Hammerspoon, create the folder .hammerspoon in your home directory and create the file init.lua in that new folder. Then paste the following code in the init.lua file and in Hammerspoon, reload the configuration.

    local log = hs.logger.new('mywatcher','debug')

    function callback(eventType)
        if (eventType == hs.caffeinate.watcher.systemWillSleep) then
            local firefox = hs.application.find('Firefox')
            if not (firefox == nil) then
                firefox:kill()
            end
        elseif (eventType == hs.caffeinate.watcher.systemDidWake) then
            local firefox = hs.application.find('Firefox')
            if (firefox == nil) then
                firefox = hs.application.open("/Applications/Firefox.app")
            end
        end
    end

    local mywatcher = hs.caffeinate.watcher.new(callback)
    mywatcher:start()
    log.i("Started")

 

[blSwagger]

Check out the comment section at the bug report linked in your OP. There's been some success reported of being able to avoid the crash by disabling Fx's relationship with the Mac's tb. One user did report success then failure. It appears it could be an SDK version issue.

The explanation in external links and the Terminal command to disable starts here (comment #38): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1320048#c38

It worked! Thanks!!! Here's a copy and paste on what to do in Terminal:

The workaround for Firefox is:

defaults write org.mozilla.firefox NSFunctionBarAPIEnabled -bool NO

Note that this will disable the Touch Bar for Firefox. After this bug has been fixed, you may want to re-enable it with:

defaults delete org.mozilla.firefox NSFunctionBarAPIEnabled

 

[HonestChicken]

ESET CyberSecurity crashes everytimes too

 

[alex0002]

Firefox crashes often everywhere, even on Windows.

Firefox on my Debian Linux desktop with multiple tabs open, runs for days/weeks without crashing.
I must admit, I usually block/disable flash, but that isn't the fault of firefox if flash is buggy.

 

[Wildkraut]

Firefox on my Debian Linux desktop with multiple tabs open, runs for days/weeks without crashing.
I must admit, I usually block/disable flash, but that isn't the fault of firefox if flash is buggy.

Yeah on Linux it's another story.

 

[997440]

ESET CyberSecurity crashes everytimes too

It doesn't appear that this issue is related to the OP. If help is wanted for this, more assistance would likely be offered for the issue if it had its own thread. You'd capture the eyes of ESET users (I'm not one) that way.

I did take a peek at their user forum and didn't see any widespread report of crashing. If you go the uninstall/reinstall route, the instructions (US) are here. Whether the uninstall instructions remove all traces or not, I don't know.

 

[n8236]

OMFG, I can't believe I haven't found this thread sooner! My rMBP from mid-2012 never had this issue. Once I purchased this tbMBP, my FireFox crashed upon every wake...SUPER FREAKIN' ANNOYIN'! Thanks for the fix!