Why does Firefox sometimes hang when closing?

This is a problem that hs happen with various releases of Firefox.


When closing the browser a message comes up saying that the browser has stopped responding and the error message appears to imply that xul.dll is the issue.

This file is always upgraded when Firefox iis upgraded and the issue is only intermittent and cannot be reproduced consistently.

Sometimes, but not always, it happens when all tabs but one are closed, at other times it happens when a number of tabs are open.


Any ideas?

 

Hi alanrf, I'm running Firefox 17.0.1 and not had any problems.
Have you tried running in Safe Mode?

Under Help in Firefox > Restart with Addons Disabled. Merry Xmas. Neil.

 

How To Resolve The Firefox XUL.dll Error is a place to start.

Maybe take a look at the video, Xul.dll Errors in Mozilla Firefox and the Way to Fix Them.

Also, Firefox Hangs When You Quit It on the Mozilla support site.

 

I had checked all of those out previously but none really answered the question. The 'hang' is intermittent and sometimes days can go by with no issue, and then, several times in succession, the problem recurs.


It is impossible to replicate so any 'solutions' are hard to check in practice.

Haven't had another hang since the first post, but I'll keep a watch on it for a few more days/weeks.


Thanks for your ideas though!

 

Hey alanrf, I hope you see this post. I have this same issue. pretty much word for word. I'd like to see what we have in common with this issue outside of just the error and hangs.
Like you said, this happens with different versions of firefox 17.0 - 18.0. I run noscript and adblock plus for extensions, for plugins I run shockwave flash and silverlight plugin(adobe acrobat disabled and windows presentation foundation also disabled). I'm on windows vista 64 bit.

Do you use any of these same things for your firefox?

If you have found the reason of these errors I would love to know, this stuff bugs the **** out of me!

 

Here's a copy of the report I made to your post under the name 'Taroonzz' in the Mozilla Support Forums.


I think I may have isolated the probable reason.

I use the Tab Mix Plus plug-in, among a few others, and I have found, over the last couple of weeks, that by disabling the Tab Mix Plus Session Manager option and using the FireFox Session Restore feature the crashes no longer occur.

I have tried cross checking other add ins, including Flash and Adobe, but there was never any consistent improvement.

I am waiting to see a solid month or so of 'success' with this latest test before I will be wholly convinced, but at the moment it is looking good.

HTH

 

Ok thanks for the information. Have you tried running firefox for long periods of time? My errors/hangs/crashes whatever you want to call them seem to happen more often when firefox is left open for longer times 2+ hours. I don't use tab mix plus so I wonder what the link is, I must have something doing the same thing however.

Anyways keep me posted on your success on fixing this, I'm curious to see if you finally found an answer to this problem.

Just read a little bit about tab mix plus, does this addon help restore old sessions?

 

It used to happen for quite short login periods and it definitely happened for long sessions, (6 hours +).


I did wonder if there was a possible memory leak issue but I am unsure how that could be checked.

 

Checking in to see if you have had any crashes since your last post or if your still crash free.

Were you getting any firefox crash reports in about:crashes when these things were happening or was it even tracking these?

 

No further forward really. Since changing the Session Manager back to the default there have been fewer issues. I am beginning to suspect that it may be related to the fact that when I shut down FireFox, and nothing else for a few minutes, all appears to be OK, but if I am closing several programs at around the same time, so that there is, presumably, some simultaneous processing going on, it crashes some times, but not others.

Probably less frequently too,if there are fewer tabs open.


Difficult to reproduce repeatably which does drag the process out somewhat.

 

I solved the problem by using Seamonkey, as default. But, I keep Firefox up-to-date, and use it occasionally, so I don't notice any misbehavior. For those who don't know Seamonkey is Firefox with Mail, and more included. I take less from my computer than combined Firefox+Thunderbird.