Hi All,

While working with an Apple Macbook Pro 15", early 2011 model, the system crashed after an ordinary task in Mozilla Firefox Quantum. I have 16 GB of GDDR3 RAM onboard, and the processor is a core i7 from the, I believe, Broadwell cpu design.

Anyway, the system was humming along at internet access speed of about 15-30 Mbps while I was browsing my Yahoo mail. After caching several page screens and so on, the screen blacked out. Almost immediately, cpu fan activity started spinning up, and the keyboard was unresponsive.

Has anybody loaded Ubuntu 20.04 onto their Apple Macbooks and found this scenario out ? I would fathom to guess that this was an ordinary system crash.

Brian

What happens when you power off and reboot?

The system returns to a normal baseline. However, there is a leftover set of files in /tmp, and my guess, is that a core file was dumped somewhere in the drive.

Not finding that core file yet, but maybe Ubuntu 20.04 has more to explain about system crashes in its bug report site, or on support pages in Ubuntu.com .

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MactelSuppor...unityHelpPages

Interesting. Only the Macbook 2012 model is supported. That makes 2013 and later Macbooks still under development or research.

If one wants cutting edge Linux support, on Ubuntu, the Mactel (Mac Intel) page is helpful.

There's plenty of browsers. Why don't you try some? Palemoon is one I like. It's a pre-Artemis fork of Firefox by ex-Firefox devs. The privacy is better, but they do give a middle finger to DRM,

Although Firefox is open source on a technicality (The source is available if you dig for it) it's really kind of closed source because bits of it are written in all these half-assed languages that nobody ever heard of before. Who can compile it from source?

Fair enough. The authors of the software want to make things easier for others, so they bet on github or some other location in the cloud to offload their work.

I would guess that obfuscated languages are pretty good for one-off renditions, like in the days of DOS, where things were experimental. Most days, now, one can find an open source distributor for a multitude of tasks and ideas.

Besides, DRM is for the copyright of certain works. If I wanted to make my own franchise for Star W*rs, the copyright holder, in this case, Disney, would have to intervene. Makes for light chatter in the pub, but not as serious as in a chat room or forum such as this one.

That's a take I hadn't thought of. I was seeing it as CV floss

I see the DRM thing as ways for large companies to rip off Joe Public, but I confess to being spoiled by linux where they give stuff away for free. It kind of makes you not want to pay for anything.

Dor the giggle, I would install palemoon or chromium, even brave, and see if your Mac problem is not just a firefox issue with your drivers or OS.

It's been about a day, and so far, the Pale Moon web browser is functioning all right. I don't know if the layout is reminiscent of early Firefox, but that is to be expected since it was a fork of the same.

No issues with passwords or password keepers, though I question the encryption of said passwords. Firefox has a server based encrypted password function, so that's one difference. Seems like the password keeper in Pale Moon is local only. Chime in if otherwise.

Trying to recreate the memory intensive Yahoo mail session. A difference in the browsers between Firefox and Pale Moon reveals the status bar on as default in Pale Moon.

Yeah, it is reminiscent of early firefox, but has diverged from that point, getting up to date with various standards. If any BDFL or oligarchy becomes too dictatorial, and not benevolent enough, the project is opened to a fork by devs who find themselves swallowing too much. It's also significantly more private.

I have stopped using browser builtin password storage a while ago and now rely solely on keepassx databases (software on Linux: keepassxc) and its AutoType feature. Once you get used to it it's actually more convenient than the browser's builtin thingy. It's definitely much safer.
And yes, FF password storage used to be really insecure around the time palemoon forked off.