You might have to Refresh Firefox again (restart Factory settings)

Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings | Firefox Help https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-se...

Do you get the same error if you type or paste about:blank in your current tab and press Enter?

If Yes: Firefox's program files might be corrupted.

If No: Can you confirm that your new tab page is set to about:blank? Here's how:

(1) In the address bar, type or paste about:config and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste newtab and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Check the browser.newtab.url preference and, if appropriate, double-click it to enter your preferred page:

• Page thumbnails (default) => about:newtab
• Blank tab => about:blank
• Built-in Firefox home page => about:home
• Any other page => full URL to the page

If Firefox won't let you edit this setting: you may have something called SearchProtect on your system. This needs to be removed from the Windows Control Panel.

Assuming the change shows up, normally you would test by pressing Ctrl+t to open a new tab... I'll cross my fingers.

To address possibly corrupted program files:

Clean Reinstall

We use this name, but it's not about removing your settings, it's about making sure the program files are clean. As described below, this process does not disturb your existing settings. Do NOT uninstall Firefox, that's not needed.

(1) Download a fresh installer for Firefox 37.0.1 from https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/ to a convenient location. (Scroll down to your preferred language.)

(2) Exit out of Firefox (if applicable).

(3) Rename the program folder

(64-bit Windows folder names)

C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox

to

C:\Program Files (x86)\OldFirefox

(32-bit Windows folder names)

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox

to

C:\Program Files\OldFirefox

(4) Run the installer you downloaded in #1. It should automatically connect to your existing settings.

Any difference?

Note: Some plugins may exist only in that OldFirefox folder. If something essential is missing, look in these folders:

• \OldFirefox\Plugins
• \OldFirefox\browser\plugins

Your crash reports all indicate the same problem, which in the bug tracking system has been traced to two specific programs:

• old versions of Comodo Internet Security (version 5.12 and below)
• nProtect GameGuard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NProtect_GameGuard)

There certainly could be other causes, but could you investigate whether you might have those?

Thanks for your answers. I refreshed Firefox, and the tabs worked fine. However, after I had synced it with my account, the problem reappeared.

jscher2000 said

Your crash reports all indicate the same problem, which in the bug tracking system has been traced to two specific programs:

• old versions of Comodo Internet Security (version 5.12 and below)
• nProtect GameGuard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NProtect_GameGuard)

There certainly could be other causes, but could you investigate whether you might have those?

I use Comodo Firewall 7, so I guess this shouldn't have been the reason for this. Also, I don't have nProtect GameGuard on my system.

However, I see that in the crash reports' Modules tab, EMET.dll or sometimes Boxcryptor's dlls are highlighted. Does that imply that these could be causing this? EMET with its current settings for firefox.exe has worked fine for me until now — and what does Boxcryptor have to do with Firefox at all?

jscher2000 said

Do you get the same error if you type or paste about:blank in your current tab and press Enter?

About:blank does not crash my Firefox. So I did a clean reinstall as you advised. However, that did not solve the problem.

Interestingly, this New Tab Crash happens only from time to time. Today I had been working with Firefox without trouble, and the problem seemed to have gone away of it's own. But then all of a sudden the browser started to crash again — similarly, every time I open a new tab, Firefox crashes. I haven't changed any system settings, installed or uninstalled new hardware or software or anything like that, so this remains a mystery.

sanemejs said

I refreshed Firefox, and the tabs worked fine. However, after I had synced it with my account, the problem reappeared.

That's interesting, it implies that something in the settings stored in a Sync account is causing this issue. But what??!! Or the intermittent nature of the problem could make this a meaningless correlation.

sanemejs said

I see that in the crash reports' Modules tab, EMET.dll or sometimes Boxcryptor's dlls are highlighted. Does that imply that these could be causing this? EMET with its current settings for firefox.exe has worked fine for me until now — and what does Boxcryptor have to do with Firefox at all?

I'm not sure the colored highlighting is significant, as many external libraries have this highlighting.

EMET has come up as an issue in some previous threads, depending on its settings, but I don't think we have a large enough sample size of EMET users to know when a new issue is emerging.

Based on a quick reading, Boxcryptor normally would operate at the file system level and Firefox would not call it directly but would simply use normal Windows system calls for browsing/saving files.

sanemejs said

Interestingly, this New Tab Crash happens only from time to time. Today I had been working with Firefox without trouble, and the problem seemed to have gone away of it's own. But then all of a sudden the browser started to crash again — similarly, every time I open a new tab, Firefox crashes. I haven't changed any system settings, installed or uninstalled new hardware or software or anything like that, so this remains a mystery.

These intermittent issues are hard to solve. So once the crashing starts, does anything stop it from repeating other than restarting Windows?

jscher2000 said

These intermittent issues are hard to solve. So once the crashing starts, does anything stop it from repeating other than restarting Windows?

What I did was — I tried out Waterfox, a Firefox fork. It seamlessly uses the same profile, looks the same, and hasn't crashed yet. After a couple of hours with Waterfox I decided to check on Firefox again, and for the rest of the day that tab crash didn't reappear. Until now.

So maybe there really is something with my profile that Firefox is sensitive to.

You could test using a new profile. It might be hard to go an entire day without your familiar add-ons, bookmarks, history... at least bookmarks are fairly easy to copy over.

Create a new Firefox profile

This is in addition to and does not replace your existing settings.

A new profile will have your system-installed plugins (e.g., Flash) and extensions (e.g., security suite toolbars), but no themes, other extensions, or other customizations. It also should come with completely fresh settings databases and a fresh cache folder.

Exit Firefox and start up in the Profile Manager using Start > search box (or Run) -- type or paste the following and press Enter:

firefox.exe -P

Don't delete anything here.

Any time you want to switch profiles, exit Firefox and return to this dialog.

Click the Create Profile button, assign a name like April8, and ignore the option to change the folder location. Then start Firefox in the new profile you created.

It might take a while to determine whether the new profile is works better than your old one. If you want to import your bookmarks from your regular profile during that time, here's how:

You can use the Library dialog (Ctrl+Shift+b or "Show All Bookmarks") to access the Restore feature. The trick is knowing where to find your bookmark backups in your regular profile. After clicking Choose File... you can paste this into the file name space and press Enter to drill down to your profile folders:

%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

The semi-randomly-named folder that has your last backup is usually the one ending with "default". Click into that one, then into the bookmarkbackups folder. Here you can pick the most recently updated file to restore.

Important: restoring a bookmark backup wipes any bookmarks currently in your active Firefox profile and replaces it with the contents of the backup file.

I think it's also reasonable to install AdBlock Plus, Classic Theme Restorer, and Status4Evar, as those, by themselves, are unlikely to be the source of this seemingly rare problem. But I wouldn't add all your extensions at once to the new profile, and if a lot of system-installed extensions show up, you might want to disable the ones you do not actually use.

jscher2000 said

You could test using a new profile.

Thanks! I did this and for the time being Firefox seems to be working fine. I will let you know if something goes wrong again.

I've got a question regarding crash reports. The Appnotes field says that I've got a "DriverVersionMismatch." Do you happen to know what does that mean?

sanemejs said

jscher2000 said I've got a question regarding crash reports. The Appnotes field says that I've got a "DriverVersionMismatch." Do you happen to know what does that mean?

I do not know what is it comparing, so I don't know whether that is a mismatch on your system or a mismatch with what Firefox or the crash stats system expects to find in the crash data. Either way, it does sound like a problem.

This could be a related issue: Firefox crashes "when I open a new tab into the enhanced blank tab (with the most popular sites)."

i know you have said this is solved, but since this page comes up 1st on the search i did to solve my problem that was similar (the tiled page was crashing Firefox)

did a search in about:config, and the problem was this http://puu.sh/jwlMj/5c7d8ad631.png the highlighted line was set to false, setting to True solved this