How to gently kill Firefox process on Linux/OS X

Question

I'm doing some automation with Firefox and although I can open Firefox window from shell, I'm not able to terminate it properly. If I kill Firefox process with kill -3 or kill -2 command the next time I open a new Firefox window it asks me if I want to run in safe-mode. I understand that calling kill -9 could confuse Firefox so it would try to run in safe-mode but -3 should be fine.

Do you have any idea how to gently tell Firefox to close properly?

Answer 1

A bit more gentle

As @skybert indicated in the comment, you can

set browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash to false.

in about:config, which

will rid you of the "Ups, something went wrong ..." message.

To get rid of the safe-mode message, you can set the config

toolkit.startup.max_resumed_crashes to -1

or (just set) the environment variable MOZ_DISABLE_AUTO_SAFE_MODE.

Less gentle

In lack of a better solution, you can remove sessionstore.js from the profile folder after the killall.

This is no more "gentle" than your solution, but it fixes the "Safe Mode" message:

Source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/817752