Crashes are bad, reporting them is good: it helps developers fix the issues. So far so good, but lately the Mozilla Crash Reporter appears to be a bit overzelous: it keeps on reporting crashes when there are none.
A few times a day it pops up after what appears to be an ordinary shutdown: i.e. I just closed Firefox myself, and it went smoothly – or so I thought.
What’s even stranger is that I’ve been experiencing this behaviour both on a Vista and an XP computer, with two entirely different user configurations (i.e. different set of add-ons).
If I have to pick, I’d rather put up with bogus error reports than real crashes in the middle of work…but I’m still curious.
It sounds like you’re experiencing crashes on shutdown. These kinds of crashes on close can be the result of something going wrong writing out your data (bookmarks, cookies, history, etc.) or from a plug-in like Flash not wanting to exit cleanly.
If you type about:crashes in your address bar and hit enter, it will let you inspect those reports.
Yes, I see those reports, but they are for programmers, not the average user.
What’s interesting is these crash reports started about the same time on different computers, so I guess either the latest Ffox update, or a plug-in update may be the culprit.