Not sure I understand what you are doing or why.

How can you monitor Firefox is continuing to run by using a GM script which itself is running in Firefox ?

Possibly the best you can do is confirm Firefox is running due to some other agent looking at Firefox GM script output. Firefox should run once started and continue until you stop it.

You should try to close Firefox from the menu options not by killing it otherwise it may not shut down properly and you may have trouble restarting it.

What exactly is the WIndow you see is it a Firefox Crash ? If so you should investigate those

• Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly)

I am monitoring the output of the GM script with a separate process.

Occasionally a window pops up which says Firefox has stopped running do you want to restart. 

I haven't found a programmatic way to detect this window and press it's buttons. This can happen any time of the day or night (or weekend) so when my monitor process detects no output from the GM script for a certain period of time then it restarts FF, but the pop-up doesn't go away and neither does the old FF process although the parent.lock is freed so my new FF process runs correctly.

Hi again John,

If the WIndow you see is a Firefox crash then Firefox should by default restart again. There is a pref that may be changed to modify this behaviour

• See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes

I am not really understanding the purpose of your setup. Ordinarily Firefox should not be crashing, but if it is then perhaps you should look into the reason for that rather than how Firefox is restarted.

It's quite a complicated setup my GM script is about 8000 lines long and runs 24/7. It's extracting data and updating an ORACLE database that I only have access to through a browser based application. I try to be near real-time with the extraction and I then feed our own system to produce notifications of changes to the database as well as statistics and many other things not provided by the original application. My suspicion is that the javascript in the application has bugs and hangs when it gets a delay in the response from the corporate network, but I can't prove that and don't have any access to the application. Anyway at times the application freezes and then my GM script doesn't run because it's event driven on page change. My monitor process can handle that and closes down the application and restarts FF, but occasionally FF produces the pop-up window that I mentioned and then things go a bit strange. I don't want FF to auto-restart for two reasons: 1. I often get the session manager window which requires user input 2. FF is started with a specific user profile, there are several depending on what I want the FF session to do. Auto restart doesn't know which profile to start up with.

This pop-up window is quite new I don't remember ever seeing it before FF28. I can try to take a screen shot next time that it happens but that may be tomorrow or in 2 weeks time I haven't found out how to predict it yet.

Please allow Firefox to crash next time. This will generate a crash report that we can look at and try to find out what the problem is.

Type about:support in a new tab or window address bar and press Enter. Under the main banner, there is a button; Copy Text To Clipboard.. Press it, then in the reply box at the bottom of this page, do a right click in the box and select Paste.

Application Basics

Name: Firefox Version: 30.0 User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0

Crash Reports for the Last 3 Days

All Crash Reports (including 1 pending crash in the given time range)

Extensions

Name: Console² Version: 0.9 Enabled: true ID: {1280606b-2510-4fe0-97ef-9b5a22eafe80}

Name: Greasemonkey Version: 2.0 Enabled: true ID: {e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}

Name: Html Validator Version: 0.9.5.8 Enabled: true ID: {3b56bcc7-54e5-44a2-9b44-66c3ef58c13e}

Important Modified Preferences

browser.cache.disk.capacity: 0 browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value: 358400 browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled: false browser.cache.disk.smart_size.first_run: false browser.cache.disk.smart_size.use_old_max: false browser.places.smartBookmarksVersion: 7 browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand: false browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash: false browser.sessionstore.upgradeBackup.latestBuildID: 20140605174243 browser.startup.homepage: http://sdbeapp32014/dmsiiguestlogin/SDPProdStart.asp browser.startup.homepage_override.buildID: 20140605174243 browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone: 30.0 dom.disable_open_during_load: false dom.mozApps.used: true dom.report_all_js_exceptions: true extensions.lastAppVersion: 30.0 network.cookie.prefsMigrated: true places.database.lastMaintenance: 1404990464 places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages: 10237 plugin.disable_full_page_plugin_for_types: application/pdf plugin.importedState: true plugin.state.flash: 0 plugin.state.java: 0 plugin.state.np32dsw: 0 plugin.state.npauthz: 0 plugin.state.npctrl: 0 plugin.state.npdeployjava: 0 plugin.state.nppdf: 0 plugin.state.npspwrap: 0 privacy.sanitize.migrateFx3Prefs: true storage.vacuum.last.index: 0 storage.vacuum.last.places.sqlite: 1404994581

Graphics

Adapter Description: Intel(R) Q45/Q43 Express Chipset Adapter Drivers: igdumdx32 igd10umd32 igd10umd32 Adapter RAM: Unknown Device ID: 0x2e12 Direct2D Enabled: Blocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating your graphics driver to version 8.1500.1000.2202 or newer. DirectWrite Enabled: false (6.2.9200.16492) Driver Date: 7-28-2009 Driver Version: 8.15.10.1855 GPU #2 Active: false GPU Accelerated Windows: 2/2 Direct3D 9 Vendor ID: 0x8086 WebGL Renderer: Google Inc. -- ANGLE (Intel(R) Q45/Q43 Express Chipset Direct3D9Ex vs_3_0 ps_3_0) windowLayerManagerRemote: false AzureCanvasBackend: skia AzureContentBackend: cairo AzureFallbackCanvasBackend: cairo AzureSkiaAccelerated: 0

JavaScript

Incremental GC: true

Accessibility

Activated: false Prevent Accessibility: 0

Library Versions

NSPR Expected minimum version: 4.10.6 Version in use: 4.10.6

NSS Expected minimum version: 3.16 Basic ECC Version in use: 3.16 Basic ECC

NSSSMIME Expected minimum version: 3.16 Basic ECC Version in use: 3.16 Basic ECC

NSSSSL Expected minimum version: 3.16 Basic ECC Version in use: 3.16 Basic ECC

NSSUTIL Expected minimum version: 3.16 Version in use: 3.16

Submitted Crash Reports Report ID Date Submitted 9c46be79-ac9e-4b31-b27d-2f789ba9dcd4 10/07/2014 00:31 05a8c228-f109-4634-915f-6fea2af691bc 30/06/2014 08:38 aa92a61b-0308-45d6-a5fa-f436e7896236 23/06/2014 19:11 c4d5b731-4a21-44d5-95d0-e9d22cf96dae 19/06/2014 09:05 8e14be28-b420-47f7-9dfe-43dffe2d12b3 07/06/2014 04:47 a80bf61d-3597-42ff-91be-add2ab8be9c6 23/05/2014 02:18 f3ef66cc-07f6-478c-967a-f8be96c89125 20/05/2014 07:35

When my multiple profile Firefox crashes it restarts with the profile that was in use. As for it having a user input screen on restart the pref browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes can be increased in value and that should prevent that from occurring.

I would be interested in a screenshot as I can not think of a recent change to the popup Windows that gives you a new popup.

Presumably the crashes only occur when the 8k lines GM script is in use. That's going to be beyond my payscale, and possibly out of scope of this forum, but I will tag as escalate and see if HelpDesk staff or anyone else comes up with useful advice ^{You forgot to add 'escalate' for HD to reply. Added! ~m}

I did not find anything for your CrashIDs e.g.

9c46be79-ac9e-4b31-b27d-2f789ba9dcd4

Note they are ordinarily prefixed with bp- if they have been submitted.

Ok as soon as it happens again I will send a screenshot. Is it possible for me to resend the dumps?

John48: (John99 should change his username :P)

Usually when Firefox crashes, the Mozilla Crash reporter comes up and presents you with two options (Quit or Restart Opera ^{wait, wha..?}Firefox). Either one will submit it to the crash-stats.mozilla.com page but sometimes they don't get submitted for some idiotic reason.

You can see if you have any new crash reports (preferably with bp- prefixed to them) by going to about:crashes in your Address Bar within Firefox.

Something that complicates the issue. My FF profiles are not on a local drive but on a drive attached to a server somewhere in the network. Also firefox.exe is on the same network drive and not the C: drive, this is to overcome the fact that I am not local admin and do not have the correct permissions to install software on the machine. It also gives me the flexibility to run this GM script from any available PC.

But as I said at the beginning. This system runs 24/7 in unattended mode. Therefore nobody sees the Crash reporter and there is nobody around to press its buttons. Secondly I don't want either of these options because I need control over what is happening. If the browser crashes and restarts itself without my monitor process intervening then I get locked out of the application for around 40 minutes. I need a crash reporter that can submit the dump in unattended mode and then exit without quitting or restarting FF.

Not sure exactly what you need but some related prefs etc.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Breakpad#Can_I_disable_Crash_Reporter.3F
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash
• and as already mentioned http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes

I am guessing at present you are not concerned about the crash reports themselves, but see also

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/How_to_get_a_stacktrace_for_a_bug_report#Alternative_ways_to_get_a_stacktrace

Thanks for those interesting links. Ideally I would like FF to submit the crash report silently and do nothing else. I need to detect the fact that the GM script has stopped creating output, I need to do a 'graceful degradation' of the application, stop the browser and bring it up again with the correct profile (I have several profiles depending on what I want the GM script to do). So if FF crash reporter comes up with windows asking me to make a choice then it blcks my automated crash detection and recovery.

I had another one of these crashes during the night. You can see here the screenshot of the message.

We're sorry to hear that Firefox is crashing. In order to assist you better, please follow the steps below to provide us crash IDs to help us learn more about your crash.

1. Enter about:crashes in the Firefox address bar and press Enter. A Submitted Crash Reports list will appear, similar to the one shown below.
2. Copy the 5 most recent Report IDs that start with bp- and then go back to your forum question and paste that into the "Post a Reply" box.

Thank you for your help!

More information and further troubleshooting steps can be found in the Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly) article.

None of my crash reports start with bp. That's probably because I have crash reporter disabled and that's because it interferes with my auto-restart procedures. Can you please tell me how to manually submit the crash reports?

I think you go to about:crashes, select a report and click Report this Crash.

Sorry much of this is outside of my experience and knowledge.

I marked this question as escalate last week^11th. I will ping HelpDesk by PM to see what HelpDesk staff or others can add. It may however be decided that your operation of Firefox as a unattended browser is off topic for this forum and that you would be better asking somewhere else such as Mozilazine.

Idea / Questions

• Are you able to create the new window whilst Firefox is running attended on your local machine.
• Set a version and profile of Firefox on A local machine with similar prefs etc where you can observe it directly.
• I note probably the key salient point is that you say the window you see is new and you can not detect it programatically. Looking at your screenshot I am not sure what is. https://support.cdn.mozilla.net/media/uploads/images/2014-07-15-01-40-52-911af7.png
• You may have to separate your unattended browser operation and the browser crash troubleshooting investigation. Graceful closedown and predicted behaviour may not be possible after a crash.
• What happens when you deliberately crash a local observed instance of Firefox ?
  • Do you see the same new popup Window ?
  • What actually is the new popup Window ?
  • I am guessing it could be a tab of a Firefox Window presumably created by your GM script, or something else not an alert generated by Firefox itself.

I have probably already said much of this

Obviously when Firefox Crashes something has gone wrong, and problems may then be expected.

When Firefox closes normally it should have no problem starting with the same profiles the next time, that is what my Firefox normally does. If you start Firefox from a commandline etc. you will have again have no problem deciding exactly which profile of your choice it uses to startup.

If you want crash reports so that you may investigate the cause of the crash you need to let the crash reporter run and set prefs to allow submission of the CrashReports.

Otherwise If you do not submit crash reports you have an alternative option to get a stack trace from the (Normally Windows) OS.

If your crashes result from your use of your 8K lines GM script you yourself need to investigate that and I imagine you will need to commence from some sort of reduced test case where you use a handful of GM script lines to trigger a reproducible crash, and demonstrate that is due to a Firefox bug. (As opposed to performing an operation that would be expected to crash Firefox or being in a situation where Firefox crashes anyway, for some other cause such as Out Of Memory)

Hi, Thank you for your question, this is the Help Desk in response to the escalate tag.

Two things for further action:

1. The error that you are receiving, does this also happen with local profiles that are not on the Network Drive? and do you have a local security software that may be scanning?
2. Please try stackoverflow.com with your question for any questions on how to implement a programmatic way to detect this warning/error that Firefox has stopped working.

Suggestions for network drive profiles, though this is not a guaranteed solution to this issue: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/t.../3626.html and http://www.experts-exchange.com/Softw.../Q_27587743.html

For further investigation on cause of crash, please post the crash reports and we can take a look at why it may be crashing.

Thank you very much, and we look forward to your reply.