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

Brian Krebs, independent computer security blogger and former columnist at the Washington Post reported on a commercial web browser exploit toolkit for hackers. Note when I say commercial that does not in any way imply it is legal or anyone in there right minds endorses it.

What it does say is that hackers go after web users systematically and would like no marks to get away, regardless of the browser the user has chosen.

However, the statistics published in the screenshots of the article show that the user's choice of web browser has the most drastic choice on whether he gets successfully hacked or not.

In the statistics sampled, Firefox 3.5.6 registered several successful attacks against it, but others were left unscarred.

Internet Explorer, you ask?  Oh, my god!  It gets mauled when it shows up on an infected web site!!  The article shows that IE is like some barroom brawler that cannot possibly walk away from a fight.  Though the successful attack rate against Internet Explorer has been steadily decreasing since version 5.0 (about 2/3 successful attacks) the rate of successful attacks for IE 8.0 is a little over 1/10.

Another interesting thing is that Firefox 3.5.x was seen twice as much as Internet Explorer 8.0 by the toolkit.

To me, these statistic say when Microsoft has been saying for the past 6 years that Firefox was not getting infected a lot was because few people are using it is not just one lie but two.  Apparently, Firefox is seen quite a bit by infected web sites.  However, for the most part these sites can look but they cannot touch.

The other surprise is that plugins do get attacked and sometimes the attacks are successful:  Java, Adobe plugins, etc. are attacked.  Java attacks are rarely successful but you do see a grouping of some successful attacks against a recent but non-current version of Java 6.  The lesson there is clear:  keep your Java web browser plugin up to date in all of your web browsers!

Another interesting though perhaps malleable fact is that the Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Flash attacks that are wildly successful on Windows when running IE, just do not currently work against the Macintosh.  Another case for the argument that a lot of people should have switched from Firefox to Macintosh years ago.  If they had, then this web hacker industry would not be quite so large and wealthy as it is now.  There is no question the minions and gangs in this industry are making quite a lot of money.

Perhaps, if IE users want to be slightly safer on the web, they will update their browsers and avoid installing plugins - like, say Silverlight.  But if they want to cut there risk by another ten to hundredfold, they will install Firefox.  At least then they will not be reeling around like a punch drunk barfly with a glass jaw.

Lesson learned:  avoid Internet Exploder - run Firefox instead - beware Adobe plugins, and keep Java plugin up to date if you have it installed in your web browser.

Labels: browsing, snafus, statistics, web