I don't think "crash" is the right word for the Firefox behaviour. Yes it does pop a window that calls itself a "crash reporter", but in my observation it's a shutdown timer timeout that expires after ~60secs.

My guess is that it's trying to obtain or release a filesystem lock, possibly one that it's lost track of in some trivial way.

I've never seen any damage or inconsistencies in the resulting environment. So I don't think it's a dramatic event, just a safety timer that isn't resolved correctly.

Probably a simple, dumb, but harmless bug.

Yes, you're right - the tabs restored fine afterwards and the restart was only delayed for a minute or so, so it was barely even a minor inconvenience.

Contrast that with the dreadful corporate-supplied Edge AI browser I have to use for one client, which seems to randomly close windows without being asked, and never seems to be able to restore them.

Reassuring to hear I'm not the only one, and would consider this a normal use case for the browser, in fact one of the main reasons I use Firefox over chrome as it's simpler to manage than the latter.

I was hinting in my original comment if these cases are contributing to crash reports in any capacity there is a small chance they could be misattributed towards the claims in the post, especially if memory is not freed correctly on shutdown. Even more so if any memory allocation is shared between processes / helpers.

If I quit normally, don't wait for the "timeout" and force quit I still get the crash report UI immediately which suggests to me something funky going on.

10% is a crazy high percentage to claim for bitflips.