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I am using Firefox 68.0.1 on Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon. This is running in VirtualBox 6.0.8, which is in itself running in Mint 19 Cinnamon. One of my recent Firefox updates has caused a large number of sites to crash tabs, though it does not happen on all sites.

What did not help:

  • I have tried disabling my add-ons, and this did not help (I had JSON Viewer and Web Developer installed)
  • I then removed them, and that did not help either.
  • I unticked "Use hardware acceleration when available" in the Preferences dialogue, again no change

What did help:

  • I switched to Safe Mode, and that stopped the tabs crashing. Therefore it seems to me that Safe Mode does more than disable add-ons, though I am not sure what.

Other notes:

  • I am aware of the about:crashes page, but the list of pending crash reports do not tally up with the crashes I have had. In order to write this post I have deliberately crashed several pages, and yet none come up in this page for today.
  • I have Firefox running in the host too, and the crashes do not happen there. However, the point of the virtual machine is to try to insulate the host from security issues, and Firefox has been working quite happily for several years in a virtualised desktop.

Main question:

  • If I could get access to a detailed crash log, that would surely give me something to search for. Can I get access to the separate-process tab crashes?
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2 Answers 2

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Found two solutions

  • use Firefox safe mode - not what I want as addons are disabled
  • in the VM settings, disable 3D acceleration - consumes more CPU but works so far

Hope Mozilla gurus will fix the problem soon.

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Two kinds of answer were possible here - either how to trace the cause of the crash, or how to stop the crash occurring. My self-answer is in the latter category.

User @DimitarII indicated in comments that they switched their graphics controller to VMSVGA, and that this fixed it for them. I believe I would have tried this before under VirtualBox 6.0.8, to no avail. However, having just installed 6.0.14, I received a deprecation notice to say that the VBoxVGA driver will be removed in 6.1. So I switched to the new driver in the virtual machine settings panel. I also upgraded my VirtualBox Guest Additions to match the new version of the host software.

Thankfully, the crashing tabs in Firefox no longer crash, and I no longer have to run Firefox in Safe Mode. I suspect the laptop will now be rather kinder to my CPU, and my battery will last longer than an hour!

Thus, the fix appears to be changing the virtual graphics driver, or upgrading to a later patch-level release of Virtual Box, or upgrading the Guest Additions, or a mix of the above.

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