Freezes, can't force quit, prevents other applications from quitting
This has happened three times in the past two months, twice when I was opening a new tab and once when I was refreshing a tab. Firefox freezes (spinning wheel), and won't force quit when I try from the dock or from the Force Quit menu or the Activity Monitor, and it will actually freeze the Force Quit Menu and Activity Monitor as well, as well as any other program I try to quit or force quit at the time. I tried to open Terminal to kill the process, but although it's able to open up, it wouldn't give me the command line.
To clarify: I can open other programs during this time but they vary in responsiveness. I played around the third time this happened; I wanted to see if I could wait it out, because Firefox did automatically quit after two minutes or so the second time this happened, but no such luck the first or third time. I ended up having to force shut down (shut down by menu would not work).
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Hangs can happen for a number of reasons. One fairly typical issue is that a plug-in is misbehaving. When you've experienced this issue do you have a page open that uses Flash, Silverlight, or other plug-in content? Can you confirm that you're on the latest version of these plug-ins? (You can view the installed version of your plug-ins via Tools->Add-ons->Plugins.)
Hmm, that might be it; my Flash was out of date and I occasionally delay updating, and it's likely I did have a page with Flash up. Thanks!
But also: I've never seen something hang the whole system like that - is there any way to quit Firefox if it hangs like that? What happens when you're unable to force quit anything? It was difficult to search for and diagnose initially.
Actually, keying off of your whole system hang, I typically see this kind of behaviour when the physical memory of the system has been exhausted and there is excessive swapping going on with the HDD. A system can get in this state if there are simply too many application running or if a single application consumes a large amount of memory starving others.
Unfortunately, the problem happened again and my Flash was up to date. I don't believe I had a page up that used Flash, either.
I have the problem when I have to force quit. I also have the pinwheel for no apparent reason and have to wait until it stops to do anything. It is frustrating as it does not happen in Safari. I like to use Firefox but it is getting very annoying. I have the pinwheel pop up when I am even typing. I tried your suggestions about starting it up in safe mode and that doesn't seem to work.