User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 If firefox renders something that hangs it and you have to hard kill it (on ANY platform), if it is able to save session info, then when you restrat firefox, it tries to restore the session and ends up rendering the "bad actor" stuff again. There should be something in the preferences that allows forcing "new session?" dialog after a firefox crash that has saved session info. (In general prefs I have "show my hompage on startup" but after killing with windows task manager, I get the behavior described above) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.find a page that reliably hangs firefox when rendered 2.hard kill firefox (with task manager on Windows) 3.restart firefox (if session info is available, firefox will rerender the offending page) Actual Results: firefox starts and proceeds to the same hang-state Expected Results: if there is a clear prefs/general/ option added to the "when firefox starts" list that is "when firefox crashes or is killed, do not rerender the previous session on restart) That will fix it T

I just looked around in about:config and I found two preferences: browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash So you can try to change the value of the first pref to 0 and see if that is what you want (you should get the about:sessionrestore page), or the second one to false and then it will show you your homepage after a crash I guess. http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config

The official solution here is to restart Firefox in Safe Mode, if you already know that something bad's going to happen (and if you don't, why not try it out first? - usually we're too slow to actually save the URL of a crashy page anyway).

Okay, now that you mentioned about safe mode , I found the instructions for starting in safe mode from the windows gui. I would like to be able to do that on the command line in cygwin. What switch is it? Note: $ uname -a CYGWIN_NT-5.1 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-06-12 19:34 i686 Cygwin $ alias ffox alias ffox='C:/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox' $ ffox -help $ ffox --help $ ffox -h There is a much bigger issue Re: defect tracking in large, widely used apps (e.g. firefox). They are very complicated, the user is not likely to know more than 5% of the operational details etc. etc. Maybe Cyc has grown up enough now to serve as a firefox advisor plugin? (-; (-;

(In reply to comment #3) > Okay, now that you mentioned about safe mode , I found the instructions > for starting in safe mode from the windows gui. > I would like to be able to do that on the command line in cygwin. > What switch is it? Do you mean the first one a Google search will show or the one the shortcut you've already found uses as well? ;-)

Bug is properly closed now. Just wanna add a suggestion from the peanut gallery to the "industry", get some smart "knowledge-based" plugins deployed to your help systems pah-lease! (but note: absolutely no "call this 800 number and speak your question to our automated attendant" IVR systems simply do not work, at all, no how) Anyway, rest assured that all my browsing is in firefox (no IE allowed except for mandatory Windows management actions)