What I do care about is when it takes X.org with it… Which it has done twice today, and killed my work both times. Firefox is fine, recovers no problem, but gedit or anything else I have open?
This bug is probably fixed in firefox 3.5 but ubuntu are holding back the 3.5 release for some reason and for now I’m stuck with 3.0. I think this bug is related to nvidia proprietary drivers, which doesn’t explain much, either way, firefox causes the crash, and we all know that firefox developers don’t really seem to care too much about Linux these days, so what’s the point in reporting a bug…
So instead of filing a bug report, which is probably a dupe of a dupe that no-one cares enough about to fix, I’d like to introduce international punch a firefox developer day.
If you have one near by, commence punching.
*This is joke btw, I don’t condone unnecessary violence against firefox developers*
This is a massive misassignment of blame – the xserver should not be crashable by anything running without root privileges, and the fact that it is could indicate a security risk. It could be the nvidia drivers or it could be something more fundamental in xorg, but there’s no reason a single application should bring down the entire window system – no more than my text editor should be able to crash my music player. There may or may not be a firefox bug involved (ie. it’s not necessarily using APIs in an unsupported way), but since the xserver is crashing there is *definitely* a bug there. I would say this sort of situation is a perfect example of why the state of firefox’s linux support is not entirely Mozilla’s fault.
Firefox causing a crash in X.org, or the nVidia drivers for that matter, is not a Firefox problem.
Your post is scarce on the details, but it doesn’t even look like you have evidence that this is in fact Firefox crashing. This could just as well be the other way around: an X.org crash taking Firefox down with it.
Even if you clicked a link in Firefox, or similar, to cause the crash, that’s hardly conclusive. Technically, X.org is a client-server architecture. And you don’t expect browsers to crash an Apache HTTPd either, right?
Firefox 3.5 doesn’t do it… Firefox 3 does… I really don’t care who’s fault it is, it shouldn’t happen, somewhere between x.org, nvidia and mozilla a solution was inevitably at some point located…
I hardly see this as a massive mis-assignment of blame, firefox 3, crash happy, firefox 3.5 not crash happy… Would you like me to take you through the logic one more time?
I totally agree that nothing *should* crash X.org, but as we all know X.org has been flakey while it was rebuilt from the inside out, I’ll give it it’s due in that sense, firefox on the other hand has been a big pile of fail on linux for a couple of years.
This is also a joke, as mozilla have obviously found and fixed the bug during the 3.5 development cycle, maybe reading the last bit on the post that says “this is a joke” might have helped you not write an “In your face” comment…
My point here wasn’t to start tracking a bug, I know already the bug is fixed, I really don’t care about the technical debate on the whys and wherefores of the crash, to put it bluntly, if I have firefox open, and firefox decides it wants to kill X, then I stop using firefox, and I start using chrome, which is far faster and doesn’t crash X…
The point was for those of you who haven’t realised was to vent after losing my work for a second time today…
Why gedit? Just use (g)vim and you have crash-recovery…
(And Yes, I totally agree, Firefox should not be able to crash the X-server…)
I have it installed, but unfortunately the ubuntu customisations of 3.0 make it difficult to set it as default etc… I tend to use it for certain things, but general clicking a link browse for a moment stuff is stuck on failfox 3.0 :/
actually I had inkscape and gedit open, gedit was mostly notes and some stuff I was jotting down inkscape was what I was working on… Inkscape doesn’t like having it’s plug pulled… :/
I really think that Ubuntu should look at moving toward Epiphany and putting effort into getting the extensions in good enough shape for 95% of people.
Daeng Bo – DEFINITELY!!!
webkit gtk for the win!
there again… chrome is pretty nice
Most of Firefox’s crashiness on linux for me has actually been the result of bugs in libxcb, not Firefox. At least, assuming your problem is BadIdChoice death, which does not cover magic X server death:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20254
Although the interesting discussion and links are in Mozilla’s Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=458092
The reason you should care that the X.org crash is the fault of X.org and not Firefox is that, theoretically, any app could crash all your graphical apps just as easily, and it’s X.org’s specific purpose to protect you from this. Even if Firefox “fixes” this problem, the bug in X.org really, really needs to be fixed as well.
Well, the reason that you should care if it is X.Org at fault for x server crashes, is that the fx guys have a larger userbase, and therefore receive an adequate number of punches already. The X.Org guys receive few (albeit hardy) punches from a much smaller base, and therefore a few more could be beneficial.
(ok, the above may not be serious)
Excellent argument… Anyone near an X.org developer?