Firefox crashes when playing video from websites

[guitarzan]

For about the last two weeks (not really sure when it started), Firefox chokes on almost any video I play from a website. I mean, simple video clips you would see on a news or entertainment website. When the video is playing, my RAM usage gradually increases at a contant and rapid rate, until it maxes out the available memory and Firefox crashes and restarts itself... and the cycle continues?!?!

When it started irritating me enough, I checked the version and it was at 33.0.x ... now I have 33.1 installed, same problem. I have uninstalled and re-installed flash player, no difference. I followed the instructions from the site below to fully uninstall firefox, reboot and re-installed firefox... I didn't install any add-ons or extensions, just a default install... still fails.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Uninstalling_firefox

My machine is an i3 with Win7 64-bit, 4G RAM. The above problems do not happen on Chrome or IE11, and does not happen using Firefox on any other machine I tried, only this one. Also, this does not happen on every video... interestingly, videos on YouTube don't seem to have a problem. But nearly every other site causes problems now.

The attached image is what Task Manager looks like while the video is playing, and then after I close firefox.

 

[goombawaho]

I would try the following:
1. Clean out temp files with CCleaner
2. Run registry cleaner in CCleaner (save backups each time). Run until no more errors.
3. Run ADW cleaner, reboot if asked
4. Run Junk Removal Tool, reboot if asked

If problem continues, run a memory test
Then do an SFC /SCANNOW Link


"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[guitarzan]

goombawaho, thanks for the reply, all good troubleshooting steps that I hadn't yet tried.

I did steps 1-3, CCleaner's registry cleaner found a bunch of stuff, probably nothing out of the ordinary, took 3 passes to come up clean. Let ADW cleaner clean everything it found, rebooted, and tested with the same video as yesterday, same problem in firefox.

Ran JRT, nothing found. Ran sfc /scannow in elevated command prompt, got "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations."

I dont have my Memtest86+ cd handy, I will try that over the weekend, but hard to imagine it's a hardware issue that only affects FF. But, possible. I should also mention that I did a Malwarebytes scan and and AVG scan, no problems.

Here is another quirk; as FF plays the video and gradually eats up memory, if I navigate away to a new page, the memory usage increase stops..... it levels off, but never releases. Then if I navigate back to the same video, the increase continues until I navigate away. it never frees up that memory unless i close FF???

btw, im using the video below as a baseline, a site that had a story about the comet landing from the other day. But it happens with almost all sites with video, definitely not limited to the site below.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...bafd-6598192a448d_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop

 

[goombawaho]

Hmmm........... My Windows 7 64bit machine won't play that video in Firefox with Flash Block enabled even when I tell FlashBlock to allow it!!! If I disable FlashBlock, it plays. Memory usage goes up to 32% of 8GB, which is unusual for my PC.

I'm not seeing any increase in memory utilization though as the video plays. There's something quirky going on with your machine. Did you look at other add-ons that you might have?

I'm gonna say "update BIOS" for no other reason than to check it off the list!!!

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[guitarzan]

When I re-installed Firefox I did not re-install any add-ons, and I only used Adblock Plus before.

I just remembered that I cloned that drive a few months ago, so I can put the drive back in this weekend, install the latest Firefox and see what happens. If the problem goes away, that will at least indicate a software problem on the os install I'm using now.

 

[goombawaho]

Excellent troubleshooting step. I would do that.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[guitarzan]

Well that was a bit of good luck to have that hard drive image; I booted it up, loaded Firefox (which was still at 32.0.3) and played the video and it was fine. Upgraded to 33.1, video problems came back! Then I went to the current image, uninstalled Firefox, installed 32.0.3, and it's fine now! So the latest version of firefox does not like my computer for some reason.

 

[goombawaho]

So, I'm at 33.1.1 now after update and that video plays fine. But I don't understand why I have to disable FlashBlock to start the video, so I'm thinking there's something different about that particular site. Can you confirm that other videos aren't behaving normally at this point?

You may have to look at all your startup items with Autoruns / Hijackthis to see if there something unusual in there. Other people would be squealing if Firefox had a problem with videos.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[guitarzan]

Thanks for all the suggestions.

When I try to stress it, by playing that video above and others at the same time, I cannot make it crash now that I reverted to FF 32.0.3. However, earlier today it did crash once... I had no videos open, though I did have a bunch of different tabs to a wide range of sites open. RAM was maxed out, so I just killed firefox.exe in Task Manager. This could have been an unrelated incident though, it seems much more stable now.

Frankly, I have always had memory problems with Firefox, but it usually takes a LONG time of use without closing Firefox before memory becomes an issue. And, it seems that others have had my problem before, but none recently, and it doesn't seem to have ever been a widespread problem. Mozilla has made several releases over the years to address this problem. Here's someone with a similar (but not identical) problem as me, and unfortunately no solid answers:

http://superuser.com/questions/7895...ep-rising-with-use-and-never-returns-to-the-i

If I discover something bad running, or come up with another fix, I will let you know... otherwise I will let this version of FF ride, and probably migrate to Chrome, which I started to get used to when FF messed up on me.

 

[goombawaho]

I've never had FF crashing problems and I haven't seen memory issues since way back and it was "plugin container" that was hogging resources. Good luck and let us know.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.