Recently encountering "beachball of death" on a mid 2010 iMAC running High Sierra after update to 10.13.6
Recently getting frequent "beachball of Death" on a "mid 2010" iMAC running High Sierra after updating to 10.13.6. [iMAC too old to use Mojave]. Happens both with Firefox 64.0 and its predecessor [I upgraded Firefox to see if this would cure the issue, but it did not]. "Refreshing Firefox", as suggested in Firefox Support may have helped in reducing the frequency. The key aspect is that it is hard to invoke Forced Quit to get out of this freeze. "Beachball" prevents access to Apple logo to invoke it, and sometime prevents right clicking on Firefox icon in the Dock. Command/Option/ESC most always invokes the Force Quit dialog box, and may or may not show Firefox as "unresponding". After finally quiting Firefox, can start it up again and it will work for minutes or hours before this starts again. Flash may be loaded, but is set to block its use. Using Adblock Plus No other extensions or add-ons Vanilla apps -- standard Apple apps, plus Google Earth, Garmin which were not in use or background at the time and no problem when running these by themselves. Trigger seems to be doing the update to 10.13.6 version of High Sierra -- Firefox problem in older iMacs ?? Thanks for your help. John Have not had problems when in Apple apps
All Replies (2)
Hi John,
Mac OS supported versions are 10.9 and higher. Some of the hardware requirements may need your review, since I am not entirely sure of the IMAC's hardware. Can you take a look at: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/64.0/system-requirements/
Second, I asked for some help in the #sumo IRC channel and Seburo suggested that you might have some crash reports that could help lead to a little more information as to why Firefox might be no longer responding. I have only seen this happen when I have more than 200 tabs open, so take a look at those crash reports. This is how you can share them with the thread. Please follow the steps below to provide us crash IDs to help us learn more about your crash.
The crash report is several pages of data. We need the report numbers to see the whole report.
- Enter about:crashes in the Firefox address bar and press Enter. A list of Submitted/Unsubmitted Crash Reports will appear, similar to the one shown below.
- Copy the 5 most recent Submitted Report IDs that start with bp- and then go back to your forum question and paste those IDs into the "Post a Reply" box.
Note: If a recent Report ID does not start with bp- click on it to submit the report.
(Please don't take a screenshot of your crashes, just copy and paste the IDs. The below image is just an example of what your Firefox screen should look like.)
Thank you for your help!
More information and further troubleshooting steps can be found in the Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly) article.
I think that this is more a hang where Firefox or the Mac OS is no longer responding and not a crash, so it might be harder to troubleshoot.
How much memory is there installed on this computer and how much memory is there available when these hangs are occurring?