Fortunately Firefox

I dropped by the Mozilla web site tonight.  I discovered on their Firefox news page, that Firefox 9.0.1 has already been released.

I am pretty excited because this version dramatically speeds up some web pages which use JavaScript.  I read elsewhere this evening that the developers used some clever optimization techniques to get the higher performance.

Apparently, MathML support has been improved too.


On a side note, this is my first post using the draft version of the new version of Google's Blogger service which will be getting an update soon.

It seems nice. This is certainly one of those changes that you notice.  The post-a-blog-entry page is nothing like the old one they have had for years.  Saying it is different is a radical understatement.

Labels: blogging, browsing, firefox, software, update, web

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

The famous Html Validator add-on for Firefox has been updated to be compatible with the current version of Firefox 3.6.  If you have the old version, tell it to go to its home page, uninstall the old version, then install the new version from its home page.

Labels: extension, firefox, html, opensource, software

There are issues fixed by updating to Firefox 3.5.6. It is very important at this time to keep Firefox up to date.

That goes for the Firefox application program itself, the extensions you have installed, and the plugins.

Unfortunately, Firefox lacks a built-in, automated way to check for out-of-date plugins and offer to update them for you.

However, there is at least a web page at the Mozilla web site that will do that for you. Using Firefox web browser, click the shiny bit of blog bling in the lower left corner of my weblog page here, so you can get that done.

That simply takes you to their web page. Their page does all the work. Just read it carefully. Make sure you bookmark their page, by the way. You will want to visit that web page regularly. I recommend doing it about once a week.

Updating Ad-ons in Firefox is easy. Just go to the Tools menu in Firefox, Choose Add-ons menu item, and click the Find Updates button at the bottom of the dialog box that appears. It will let you know if there are any updates that need to be applied and then display a Restart button if there are.

To update Firefox itself, you should go to its Help menu and choose the Check for Updates menu item.

If software developers at Mozilla update Firefox, but you never get those updates from them - then your computer just gets more and more at risk. Plus, you are not going to get improvements. The same goes for updating its third-party plugins and add-ons.

Labels: browsing, firefox, software, update, web

Firefox has a pretty cool web page. It came out this autumn and it tells you if Firefox has any out of date plugins. Plugins can do anything. Since flaws are constantly being discovered in plugins for every web browser, and updates keep coming out for them - you need to know when that happens and take measures to update them.


Firefox plugin check

Tell your Firefox-using friends about the page that points to so they can be safer too.

Hopefully, this feature will get built into the web browser in the future. It seems awkward to be passing around a crucial feature by its URL.

Labels: Firefox 3, software, update

A new version of Firefox (2.0.0.2) has been released to fix some problems and to help it work better with Microsoft Vista.

Labels: firefox, software, update, vista