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

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 11:43:46AM +0100, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> You might be hitting the memory limit for a 32bit binary.

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 05:41:24PM -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> Thank you!  That is probably it.  The older machines are all
> 4 GB 32 bit laptops ...

Not running out of memory, not close. 

I'm running System Monitor at a 0.1 second cadence.  I
saw no spike in memory usage;  idling after a restart,
the system uses about 300 MB and Firefox adds 200 MB. 
I go to eBay (which repeatedly crashes firefox with a
segfault within a few seconds) and there are no spikes
in memory usage.  This is a code problem, not a memory
problem.  The segfault is because the firefox code is
talking to Elvis.

Not sure about "blame", but lately the Firefox developers
seem unconcerned about regression testing and focused on
adding bells and whistles, and nagging users about
deviations from firefox-approved security practices.

I will eventually upgrade the machines to SL7 64 bit, but
until then, I will downrev firefox on the SL6 32 machines
and disable firefox upgrades.  I have daily backups
(dirvish), so I can reconstruct the pre-upgrade firefox
config files if necessary.

I run longterm support distros because my mind is getting
old, and I will have much less ability to manage big
change in the future.  Firefox used to be a solution, but
if it has become the problem (support and ideology), then
I should learn to use a better browser sooner than later.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]