On Tue, 9 May 2017, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> Since the mid-April update, firefox 52.1.0 (32-bit) "esr"
> has been crashing often, on three similar SL6.9 machines.
>
> segmentation fault, no debugging information, also in
> firefox -safe-mode
>
> Has anyone else solved this?

I've seen no problems with firefox-52.1.0 64bit
on 64bit SL6.9.

Firefox does use a *lot* of RAM (currently top says
5871m virt and 3.2g res) though I haven't noticed
this increase rfom 48esr to 52esr.
You might be hitting the memory limit for a 32bit binary.

> No crashes with two SL7.3 64 bit machines.
>
> I can spend a few hours going through the debugging
> steps, or waste a few months upgrading all machines
> to SL 7.3 (hundreds of 32 bit programs to recompile).

Are your SL6 machines running SL6 32 or 64 bit ?
You can run 32bit programs on SL6-64bit if that
makes migration easier (or are you using 32bit hardware?)

> But if anyone else has solved this, it will save
> some time for me and perhaps others.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Keith
>
> PS: "ESR" used to be older versions compiled for LTS
> distros with older libraries, like RHEL/SL/CentOS.
> Why the sudden jump from 39 to 52?

Hmm. You should be jumping from 45 to 52 -
Firefox 45ESR replace 38ESR in April 2016.

The idea of ESR is that you only have a major update
about once a year (with 12 weeks of overlap*)
and for that year the ESR release gets security updates.

* although RHEL removed the first 6 weeks of the overlap
by not releasing also 52.0 when 45.8 came out.