Firefox Frozen

December 16, 2007 6:56 AM

Computer geniuses of all stripes: What the heck happened?? I hit the back button in Firefox, using OSX 10.4.11, and I got this page!. I can't force quit Firefox, I can't shut down the computer (it times out), and I can't access the window that's behind the one shown in the picture!! Of course I could 'hard' reset the computer - but my questions are these....

1 - Is there any way to get Firefox to close that I haven't thought of so I can avoid a hard reset?

2 - Why on earth did this happen?

Thanks for your help.

posted by crapples to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

1. Easiest and fastest: open a Terminal window and type: killall -9 firefox-bin

2. Firefox, in my experience, often has odd lockup issues.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 7:02 AM on December 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

You may or may not need to put a sudo in front of the `killall -9 firefox-bin` ... but yes, that should solve it.

If you do that and it doesn't work, just go ahead and hard-reset the computer, that means that the process has gone zombie and nothing will kill it.
posted by SpecialK at 7:04 AM on December 16, 2007

Response by poster: That did it! Thanks so much for your help. I'd rather avoid hard-resets if possible. Thanks again.
posted by crapples at 7:10 AM on December 16, 2007

You don't even need to hit the terminal, usually. Either select 'Force Quit' from the Apple menu or hit Command-Option-Esc. Select Firefox from the list.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:48 AM on December 16, 2007

From the looks of it, that is not a page but rather a very long error message. Firefox blindly puts the error message in a dialog, on OSX these are the "Sheets" that drop down. In this case the message is so long there is no place for the OK button. Although you've resolved it I bet clicking on the message and hitting [enter] would have closed it.
posted by IronSurfer at 9:13 AM on December 16, 2007

nathan_teske: The OP said Firefox won't force quit.

crapples, if you have trouble remembering the Terminal method, you can usually open up the Activity Monitor (in /Applications/Utilities), highlight firefox, and press the "Quit Process" button at the top. I'm pretty sure that is doing something similar to kill (or is at least more forceful than force quit).
posted by ckolderup at 9:23 AM on December 16, 2007

Instructions on how to create an Automator action that will restart Firefox HERE. This is a nifty tip that has bailed me out of a few situations like the one you've described.
posted by General Zubon at 9:52 AM on December 16, 2007

Often, when you can't force quit an application by the command option shift escape combo, you can command tab to switch to another application, then you can choose force quit from the apple menu and close the offending program.
posted by advicepig at 12:47 PM on December 16, 2007

Seconding hitting the Return key if this happens again. It looks like an error message that's so big it's hiding the OK and Cancel buttons.
posted by tepidmonkey at 2:40 PM on December 16, 2007