Firefox won't Force Quit?

Sorry I can't help, but yes, I'm having the same problem. Seems to have appeared since Firefox 41 came out (I'm running on OS X 10.11). Like you, I find it's just freezing up, but unable to Force Quit it, and it doesn't show up in any process lists, and it can't be relaunched either.

I managed to clear it from the Dock, by using 'sudo killall launchservicesd', and then 'sudo killall Dock' in Terminal, but that gives varying degrees of 'fix'. Sometimes it's OK, and I can continue as normal, but often it still leaves something active that even prevents a restart/shutdown, and I have to use a hard (power button) shutdown.

For now I have deleted all Firefox Mozilla stuff from my system.

Cheers

Andy

I don't think it is a Firefox specific problem.

I had this problem with many applications.

Thanks for the workaround, it worked for me!

But Apple must fix this!

I already made a link to here for other people also having this problem:

After crash, apps still appear in dock but no active process and cannot force quit.

Hmm, interesting. I hadn't had this with anything else yet. However, I have found another little anomaly which might be a little pointer.

I have been a user of BookMacster for some time, but have recently found it not running. After a bit more testing, I found that it had trouble because of Firefox's inability to open and close cleanly in the Dock (It's not just BookMacster though, it does this if you restart Firefox after changing and extension or installing an update). I deleted Firefox and gave Chrome a try instead, now that isn't having the same trouble, in that it gets stuck in the Dock, but it won't allow BookMacster to open and close it cleanly to run its extensions, and gives pretty much the same end result as Firefox does.

May be nothing in that, but you never know.

The strange thing is that everything else is fine, it just seems to be these web browsers.

Haven't deleted anything, and everything is still ok since I used your workaround:

sudo killall launchservicesd

and then

sudo killall Dock

in Terminal.

I had this problem with Adobe Reader, Path Finder (not updated to the latest version for El Capitan)and Text Edit. But never with Firefox.

I use Safari, Firefox and Chrome every day.

Hi,

I've had this problem with Firefox hanging and refusal to force quit for a while. The solution that has worked for me is to untick the "use hardware acceleration when available" option. Go to Preferences>advanced and untick the box. Restart Firefox and hopefully this will solve the issue.

I've found my solution now too, all has been well since I removed the MacUpdate Desktop software.

TheWildRover wrote:

I've found my solution now too, all has been well since I removed the MacUpdate Desktop software.

That was a good thing to do regardless of any other issue. They are bundling "stuff" with some of their installers now.

By disabling hardware acceleration you might have performance issues. In my case it didn't fix it anyway... 😟

I also don't have MacUpdate installed in my machine.

I am having this problem too. I find it happens when Firefox does an update. Force quit doesn't work. Force quitting from Activity monitor doesn't work and the system won't shut down because it can't close Firefox. The only way to shut down is pressing the power switch for 20 seconds ... Sometimes even that doesn't work and I have to unplug the system. None of the suggestions in this post have solved the problem so far.

Hey liztull,

I would try restarting your computer in safe mode then try to update (hold shift on start up). This should disable any background processes for firefox. Or create a new user and then update from that user. It will update the rest of the users as well, then uninstall firefox then reinstall after the update. After the update if you have issues starting up, I would try safe mode again.

The Firefox update goes fine and in fact, Firefox works fine. It's only when I Try to close Firefox or shut down (I usually close all apps before shutting down) that I have the problem. I have had a similar problem with Adobe CC Desktop and that was due to 2 copies (Old and New) of the App being in the system.

After the restart, the old Adobe app got cleaned up and everything worked fine. That is sort of like what is happening with Firefox. Once the system restarts clean with the updated Firefox, everything seems to work fine until the next update and then it has that hiccup on on the first program restart.

Having said that, I am going to see if I can change the update setting from 'Automatic' to "Notify me of Updates" ... then I can shut down FF, install the downloaded update and I don't have to worry about residual / conflicting program data being resident in memory when FF restarts.

I am having the problems with Firefox described here and, likewise, none of the proposed solutions has worked. About ready to trash FF and switch to something else, except it is not even clear FF is the problem rather than the symptom.

There have been no posts for a month on this thread. Has everyone else found a solution or given up?

Any further help or info greatly appreciated!

Robert

gnomen did it start when you upgraded OS X to El Capitan? This issue is been discussed by Mozilla here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1258515

Also I advise you to report your problem to Apple (like I did). They are going to ask you to provide some system reports to help understanding the problem. You can do that here: https://bugreport.apple.com/

Could be. I have had the problem for some months. As discussed in the bugzilla link, at first I thought it was a one-time glitch which would clear up with the next release from either Apple or Firefox.

I am running OSX 10.11.4 and Firefox 45.0.2. In all I have 3 iMacs and 2 Macbook Pros in the house. It only seems to occur on my main iMac, even though all are up to date. My main iMac is mainly distinguished by having a 3Tb Fusion drive which caused a lot of problems back in the day.

Lately Firefox has started quitting unexpectedly when I close one of the tabs. Seems to be a random event so difficult to reproduce. But when it crashes I have the same problem of not being able to restart Firefox or shutdown the Mac -- again, not every time. As someone said, it is a very annoying bug.