This machine is running on ATI, however my media machine in the den is running on a old 8800gtx. I am no longer experiencing this problem on that machine, I thought it had been fixed. The only way to stop it I know of is to turn off hardware acceleration in the browser. Though I'm curious why you are still experiencing the problem, I was under the impression it had been fixed. Given the vague nature of your hardware info , that's about all I can tell you.
I started this thread a while back...shocked to see it still alive!
I just upgraded to FF6 as well and STILL get the same crash when I open Download Helper...specifically when it is asking where you want to save the file. Since I experience no issues except when I open DH I will assume DH is the problem.
I did submit a bug to FF and I got a very nasty response from them stating this was not a FF issue but an Nvidia issue which is false....if it is a driver issue it is because DH is interfering with the driver causing the crash.
Aside from that the only work around is when it asking where to save the file if I do it very quickly and click save and get the menu closed I can normally avoid the crash and the screen will only flicker instead of totally crashing. If I leave that menu open too long it will crash 100% of the time.
Just as a side note I will add that in 3 years I have NEVER had a video card driver crash other than these related to FF/DH so somebody has a bug that is not getting fixed. This issue was reported back in FF 4 beta and well known and it made it into the realease and all releases since then. Now DH is surely the problem but it seems between the peeps at FF and DH someone could get this fixed.
I really am confused about where the the bug lays. It is sure that the crashes only appear when GPU HW support in Firefox is enabled and when I'm working with Firefox ie. it is rendering the pages actually. Maybe it's related to some CUDA problem with my graphics card as I see some inproper spacing for a few pages when HW accel is on. The downloadhelper I have installed too bud am not sure if that's the cause as for me FF crashes when I don't do anything with that addon. So far I'm not getting any driver crashes when using GPU accleration in other situations like video playback using CUDA. I'd really appreciate if FF and Nvidia developers communicated this prblem and fixed it on one or both sides.
I understand you feel some kind of loyalty or whatever to nvidia, but fixes in this kind of issue have always fallen on the graphics card maker.
Why else do you think you get 10 to 20 driver updates from nvidia and ati both every year.
They are almost exclusively to fix crash and corruption problems with games and apps.
Sorry it's just the way it is. I have an nvidia card on my machine in the front room it's no longer suffering this problem, and hasn't since ff5.
The only suggestion I will make is a complete wipe of the nvidia drivers/control panel and then a fresh reinstall.
This can't be achieved simply by uninstalling it. You'll need to use a third party tool like
Phyxion.net - Driver Sweeper
I wouldn't suggest going this route only the problem no longer occurs for me so I'm assuming nvidia has, in fact fixed the problem. You are probably still experiencing it because of a problem when updating the driver (they aren't always obvious)
Anyhow it's your call on how to proceed I can't promise you that fix will work, though it can't hurt anything either.
found these posts & thought I'd add my two cents...went out and bought a new system in July 2011...graphics card is the nvidia gts 450...
used firefox (...love the proggie & have about 1,000 bookmarks) but since my switch to IE-- no crashing issues.
when I leave the system on overnight with firefox running, upon waking the system from sleep mode, I got lots of colorized pixelations follow by the message that my nvidia graphics driver has crashed and then recovered.
Firefox is the definite culprit here.
I'm still convinced it's the nvidia drivers as I get the problem on my nvidia rig, but not on my ati rig.
I was told at NVIDIA forums that that may be graphic card hw fault. Don't know however how to discover it, my GC behaves otherwise quite normally not producing any misbehaviour. The BSOD's only appear when PC is idle. I'm very often having some conversion or similar process running in background, never had the driver stopped responding during this. As soon as the conversion finishes and there are idle CPU resources, I'm starting to get these driver freezes, interesting.
A good stress test for graphics is the heaven benchmark.
Cool to look at too if your card supports dx11
though it works with dx10 too.
Heaven DX11 Benchmark | Unigine: real-time 3D engine (game, simulation, visualization and VR)
It's also free.
It's actually nvidia, not firefox. The issue is basically this. When a card is idle, it is undervolted, because it isn't working very hard and as such can power down because basic usage doesn't tax it. This is basically the same principle as Intel's Speedstep or AMD's Cool N Quiet.
Now hardware accelleration makes the GPU work, but because it isn't hard work, the card doesn't power itself back up again. It can't draw enough power, and so crashes. The 200 series suffered from this for a while, but driver updates fixed it. If it was firefox, it would happen on all cards, so the issue is with drivers.
After all I stick to conclusion that it's software fault, not HW. I have sent the laptop where the problem was observed to service with request for performing thorough GPU hardware diagnostics, the result was negative (graphic card didnot exhibit any faults during the tests). So either it's a problem of Nvidia driver which isnot able to handle specific HW acceleration operation, or Firefox which requests unauthorized HW operation at Graphic driver.
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