Portable FF 30 crashes (becomes a black window and error message appears) when browsing pages with lots of gif-animation or map sites with lots of photos (such as wikimapia.org, panoramio.com, maps.google.com).
This is closely connected with RAM-cache: if you open Task manager (ctrl+shift+esc), then open wikimapia.org, for example, and zoom in and out looking at some pictures, you can see how high memory usage is growing. On my PC it reaches about 2.3 - 2.5 Gb out of 4 Gb of RAM installed (Windows 7 32bit) and crashes.
This happens on clean Firefox Portable (no add-ons installed).
I'm using Firefox Portable on HDD and I tried to enable disk cache through "about:config", but every time I restart Firefox "browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled" and "browser.cache.disk.smart_size.first_run" are set to "false", while "browser.cache.disk.enable" is "true".
Hope there is a solution for such problem.
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Portable FF 30 crashes (cache problem)
June 12, 2014 - 4:54pm
#1
Portable FF 30 crashes (cache problem)
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The only setting we touch is browser.cache.disk.capacity which we set to 0 by default. The reason is that this is easily accessible to the end user via the Options window. This value is only set in the default prefs.js that Firefox Portable starts from. It is not altered by the launcher during use.
We do not alter browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled, browser.cache.disk.smart_size.first_run, or browser.cache.disk.enable in any way. They are not set in the default profile and the launcher does not change them in any way if you choose to change them. If anything is changing those settings, it is either something internal to Firefox or an extension or plugin.
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I must admit that this problem happens also with regular FF installation on 32-bit systems (windows 7 or XP), but on Windows 8.1 64-bit (4 Gb RAM) RAM usage goes all the way up to about 3 Gb and then gradually decreases without crash.
I'll repeat that this was tested on clean Firefox Portable and regular FF installation (no add-ons installed and no tweaks were made).
If the issue happens in a regular local Firefox install as well, it is an issue with Firefox itself and not something we can assist with. We don't code Firefox, we package it portably. I've never encountered this issue myself with Firefox despite using it every day, but I also don't browser image-heavy sites. I couldn't find anything related to a current bug in Firefox about this issue, so you may need to file a new bug.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
After some investigation and search on Mozilla forum the reason was found: after turning hardware acceleration off (Options > Advanced > General > Browsing -> use hardware acceleration when avaialable > restart FF) everything is ok!
Although this doesn't explain such behavior on different systems (maybe some driver/hardware issues).
Sounds like a graphics driver issue. This crops up most often on laptops which usually have outdated graphics drivers due to the laptop manufacturer (Toshiba, Sony, etc) not repackaging and updating the drivers from the GPU manufacturer (Nvidia, AMD, Intel). In some cases, you can get the base driver from the GPU manufacturer and update to that which may fix the issue. Backup first, though.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!