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Leopard locked up, frozen, by Firefox

F

fredsherbet

macrumors member
Original poster
It's happened to me before, on my macbook, and it eventually recovered, but I wanted general advice about if there's anything I can do to get it to recover, maybe info about what has happened? (if anyone knows)

So, I opened some site in Firefox that has a flash or javascript thing, and I'm pretty sure that's what caused it (this time) on my Mac Pro. The spinning beachball came up, and although I can move my mouse, nothing is responsive. The beach ball comes and goes. iTunes finished the song it was playing. A few minutes later it played the next one, then stopped again. I can access the hard drives over the network, as normal. As far as I can tell, the processors aren't bogged down thinking about anything (the fans are low, and it feels cool).

I'm not sure if I saved my work (I usually do!) before I went browsing the Internet, so reluctant to reboot if it will recover. I'm also curious, since it seems to me quite odd... and why should it get completely locked up with so many spare processors (it's an 8-core mac pro)

I just noticed it's been half an hour now... there doesn't seem to be much hope!

Any advice/knowledge would be appreciated,

Fred

Problem System: latest Mac Pro, 2x quad 2.8GHz, 6GB RAM (2x1gb, 2x2gb), 8800GT. All latest software updates, running Leopard.
Running apps:
safari, firefox 2 (with something javascripty/flashy loading), mailplane (not beta), iCal, TextMate, BibDesk, TexShop, iTunes, Slingshot, Transmission, Applescript editor.
 
No... the keyboard is entirely unresponsive. I've left it over night, and it hasn't recovered, so it's time to cut its power 🙁

I'm gonna look into enabling SSH, so that if it happens again, I can still have control over it (it'd be interesting to see if I can get control, since I can still access its drives over the network)
 
i have trouble imagine this, My guess is that something deeper with your system is at fault here.
 
I figured the entire system locking up must be a fairly known thing. My macbook has done it twice that I can remember in the year that I've had it (completely unresponsive, except mouse moves) but recovered after about 10 mins or so (and appeared to very quickly react to mouse clicks etc that I'd done while it was frozen)

I've had the mac pro for about a month, and it happened that once, but didn't recover in the 8 hours I left it. Same thing, mouse moves, but NOTHING else works (including keyboard, and therefore cmd-alt-esc)

Is this something others have experienced? Obviously it doesn't happen much, not enough to really bother me, but I would like to know what to do in such a situation, and what is known about it. Google hasn't shown anything particularly helpful.

If it doesn't happen to others, then it's probably a combination of software I use
 
Firefox is good and all but when it screws up it screws up big. Back when I was a Windows user I was using Fx on my HP laptop when it caused Windows to freeze. I forced a shut down and couldn't get Windows to boot so I took it into the shop and sure enough my hard drive had failed. I'm not sure if this was entirely the fault of Firefox as my sisters HP laptop done the same thing (she was an IE user) but I quit using it after that nonetheless.
 
GSMiller said:
and sure enough my hard drive had failed.
Click to expand...
I can assure you that wasn't FF. I've been using it since before it was version 1.x, use it at work too, Mac and PC, and though I will say I've had my issues, this is not one of them (nor would a hardware failure such as this). Bring up Activity Monitor. Delete you FF prefs first of all. Maybe even try an Intel optimized version instead of the standard one. Or try the new v.3 RC. Don't load any addons. Try to just go to Google or something else innocuous. Is it just a page, or pages, with an addon? Do you have the latest Flash, Shockwave, etc. plugins? Could be lots of things. Never had it bring down my entire system though. Especially the speedier ones. It's pretty self contained. It shouldn't do that.
 
Problems with FireFox Locking Up Leopard.

Yes, it's true. FireFox is locking up my computer. Everything stops working with FireFox. Computer locks up, I get the rainbow circle and I cannot even do force quit on anything. Everything slows down. Seems as though FireFox hogs all the resources and makes every movement take like 5-10 min. FireFox Sucks now. I don't use it anymore. I'm using Opera as a replacement and problems went away. If I use FireFox, same crap happens, then I have to hold down the power button and shutdown. 😡
 
perlparadise said:
Yes, it's true. FireFox is locking up my computer. Everything stops working with FireFox. Computer locks up, I get the rainbow circle and I cannot even do force quit on anything. Everything slows down. Seems as though FireFox hogs all the resources and makes every movement take like 5-10 min. FireFox Sucks now. I don't use it anymore. I'm using Opera as a replacement and problems went away. If I use FireFox, same crap happens, then I have to hold down the power button and shutdown. 😡
Click to expand...

Firefox 3 will be released tomorrow. It absolutely flies on OS X in comparison to 2 and I have yet to see it crash (and I've been using it since B3). Firefox 2 was a catastrophe on OS X, that's been fully acknowledged by everybody.

If you really can't wait, here's RC3 of FF3 - it is, for all intents and purposes, the final release build to be put out to everybody as an update tomorrow.
 
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