On my best understanding, it sounds like a graphics card(/module) glitching, for probably no reason at all to do with the browser (just a co-inky-dink that you were doing that at the time), with data returned that confused the drivers/HALs enough to upset the whole kernel. Hard to imagine, but who knows what even a
single flipped bit could cascade into causing, if you happened to be very unlucky...
Assuming that no site in your history had a gigabye-sized favourite.ico (or whatever), or some related Zero-Day Exploit wot we know not the wot of..?
(I take it the frozen laptop is now unfrozen? Either it recovered or you powered it down (relatively nicely or forcefully) and it rebooted nicely, perhaps even let you play L4D again. If it's
not recovered at all, I'd be suggesting a mobo/sub-module failure
probably in the vicinity of the GPU - but not necessarily - and/or system file corruption with either possible cause<->effect relationship with the freeze event. But I read between the lines that the return to normal (albeit frozen) did not lead to looking utterly-bricked.)
Sorry, Wild-Arsed-Guessing. Except for my deviation into .ico exploit territory (which I think is just something I made up) I just don't think there's any particular connection, over and above that which would occur for
any utility. ICBW[1].
However, in the light of LordBaal, posting while I was still editing, there
could be some error in the dev library FF builders use, or a skewy system call now heavily grandfathered into the sourcecode that reacts oddly for a very small subset of the possible hardware/layers it might encounter. Which might be more the fault of the vendor involved than at the Mozilla end. But with the Mozilla community being what it is, I'd still expect it to neither be an unknown (beyond you two) nor an unfixable/unfixed issue. It's a pity the few times I've had cause to check the relevent bugrep/forum pages (most recently, when they totally ruined several aspects of the Android UI, last year) I just found it far too busy to understand where the appropriate complaints might be referenced/solved, and/or how I might contribute an Opinion of my own about it.
[1] If it
is "always fails on accessing History, and only then":
A) see if you can change the mode of the History. I forget if desktop FF has "view by last access/view grouped by site/view grouped by dates" options, in its current incarnation/whatever version you're stick with (32-bit legacy version, e.g.). Some of those modes may defer crashing until expanding a given sublist, which could indicate (through trial and error) if some date's recollection of some site's pages are tripping things up, perchance,
B) Deleting the History (or partial bits of it, aided by the subfoldering from (A) to both identify them and restrict your deletion to a small ramge) might get it past this strangeness, if it exists. Any opportunity to back that up (however it's stored, and however it might be restores for later testing/reporting) would be helpful for future analysis/bugrepping purposes, but secondary to just getting you working in this odd condition.
C) Ultimately, update/reinstalling/replacing the browser might be necessary, because it's the History-handler gone wrong.
...but I honestly don't expect this bit to be relevent.
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Topic: The Generic Computer Advice Thread (Read 572490 times)