Fortunately Firefox

My iMac running latest, up-to-date Mac OS X (10.6.3) blue screened while I was typing in Safari and went through a reboot process.  It seemed to take extra long compared to a warm boot; seemed like a cold boot or even a boot that did some kind of update.

At the time it happened, I had Safari in the foreground and I had Firefox sitting idle in the background.

Other applications were not running.  I have 5.6 GB of disk storage free on my boot drive.  My computer was downstairs on the western facing side of the house.  So there were no free disk space or ambient temperature problems.

When the system came back up, I was naturally curious what was in the logs at the point it crashed and just before that so I ran the Console application that comes as part of the Mac OS. What I saw surprised me.

There was a process called "firefox-bin" running and it was running amuck.  The process was logging over a dozen messages per second.  Every message was the same error:


6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)
6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)


Well, I am pretty sure I had not launched Firefox yet! It had not been opened, yet firefox-bin, the main Firefox application process, was already running.  Not only that, it was stuck in a loop trying to do something it could not do, over and over really quickly.

I checked and this error message repeatedly being output has been reported by other users back in late 2009, running Mac OS X 10.5 (older than my 10.6) and an older version of Firefox than I have.

Here is the discussion thread on it at support.mozilla.com: System.log shows that Firefox is spamming the following error in large chunks .  The person who posted that message listed the error message absolutely identical to the one on spotted above on my system.  They said they updated Firefox, and the problem went away.

Oh, and someone reported the same problem (same error message) being output by iCal in December 2009:   _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001).  Completely unrelated application gave the same error message.

I killed the process, by the way.  I am not sure why it was running, what it was doing, why it had this error and why it was apparently doing it really fast over and over in a tight loop.  Nothing about it seemed kosher or okay.

Here is me killing the rogue, runaway Firefox process:


John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ ps 4299
  PID   TT  STAT      TIME COMMAND
 4299   ??  Ss    19:26.69 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin
John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ ps -elf 4299
  UID   PID  PPID        F CPU PRI NI       SZ    RSS WCHAN     S     ADDR TTY           TIME CMD                  STIME
  501  4299     1     4000   0  57  0   517184 189464 -      Ss    40a5000 ??        19:27.11 /Applications/Fi   4:01.47
John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ kill -9 4299

I am running Firefox 3.6.3 which has a reported file size of 55,240,723 bytes on my system.  I am really sure about those two numbers because I copied and pasted them directly from the Get Info pane in the Finder.

I am really disturbed by this highly unusual and unexpected behavior on my system. Nothing like this has ever happened before on this computer. In all the 2 or 3 years I have had it, it has never spontaneously rebooted.

I am going to look into this further because clearly something is wrong with my system at that point on the basis of the reboot.  Why Firefox was running and why it had this error message being logged at an absurdly rapid rate over and over is an issue too. Whether they are related or not, I cannot say at this point but I hope to find out soon.

I verified my Mac was up to date immediately after the reboot.  It was except for printer software which must have been updated in the past week.

Labels: crash, firefox, macintosh, macosx, reliability, security, snafus, software, web