Stop Firefox Crash Reporter Popup from Appearing

Firefox can keep showing the Crash Reporter popup long after a crash, sometimes on every launch, because pending crash reports remain in your profile folder.

You have three ways to stop it. Turn off crash report submission in Privacy and Security settings, blank the breakpad.reportURL preference in about:config, or set MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DISABLE. Then delete the leftover pending reports so the dialog stops coming back.

In this guide, I have covered:

Why Firefox shows the Crash Reporter popup

Firefox shows the Crash Reporter popup when the browser finds a pending crash report and wants to send it to Mozilla for analysis. The built-in crash handler captures a minidump when the main process crashes. The dialog you see is the standalone crashreporter executable launching on its own after a hard crash or an unclean shutdown.

Pending reports stay in the Crash Reports/pending folder inside your Firefox profile. On the next clean start, Firefox can detect those unsubmitted reports and show the dialog again. That is why the popup can appear even hours after the original crash.

This is desktop Firefox behavior. Firefox on Android and iPhone uses the system crash reporter instead.

Turn off crash report submission in Firefox Settings

If the popup appears after every launch, start with the quickest fix. Firefox has a data collection panel where you can turn off crash report submission.

1. Open Firefox and click the hamburger menu in the top right, then click Settings.
2. In the left sidebar, click Privacy & Security.
3. Scroll down to the Firefox Data Collection and Use section.
4. Uncheck every checkbox in that section that allows Firefox to send crash, technical, or interaction data.
5. Close the Settings tab. Firefox saves the change as soon as the box is unchecked.

After this, Firefox still captures a crash report locally. It just will not ask to send the report to Mozilla on the next launch.

The exact wording of each checkbox has shifted across recent Firefox versions. If you do not see a crash-specific option, unchecking every data sharing box in this same section is enough to fully opt out.

Block Crash Reporter submissions via about:config

If the Settings toggle does not fully silence the popup, blank the submission URL. Firefox stores the crash submission endpoint in a Breakpad preference that you can clear.

1. Open a new tab and go to about:config. Accept the warning that appears.
2. In the search field, type breakpad.reportURL and open that preference.
3. Replace the current value with an empty string and click the checkmark icon to save.
4. Restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

Once breakpad.reportURL is empty, the Crash Reporter has nowhere to submit. The dialog will not prompt you on the next crash.

TIP:
You can confirm the change by opening about:crashes in a new tab. Firefox will still list any pending reports, but it will tell you that crash report submission is disabled.

Disable the Crash Reporter entirely with an environment variable

When you want the strongest fix, stop Firefox from loading the crash handler at all. Set MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DISABLE to 1. Mozilla’s source documentation describes this variable as a way to fully disable the exception handler in non-debug builds.

The steps below are for Windows. On macOS and Linux, export MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DISABLE=1 in the shell that launches Firefox, or add it to the user’s shell profile.

1. Close Firefox completely.
2. Open the Start menu and search for Edit the system environment variables, then click the result.
3. In System Properties, click Environment Variables.
4. Under User variables, click New.
5. Set Variable name to MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DISABLE and Variable value to 1, then click OK.
6. Click OK on the remaining dialogs to save, then start Firefox.

With this variable set, the standalone Crash Reporter dialog will not appear at all, even on a hard crash. You will need to delete the variable manually to restore the default behavior.

ALERT:
Setting this variable removes your ability to contribute crash data to Mozilla. Only do this if you are comfortable debugging Firefox crashes yourself and know you will not need the Crash Reporter’s diagnostics.

Delete pending crash reports left in your profile

Even after you disable submission, old reports can still trigger the popup on the next launch. Clear them out and the dialog has nothing to prompt you about.

1. Open a new tab in Firefox and go to about:support.
2. Under Profile Folder, click Open Folder (or Open Directory on macOS and Linux).
3. Inside the profile folder, open Crash Reports, then the pending subfolder.
4. Select every file inside pending and delete them. Leaving the folder empty is fine.
5. Optionally, also clear the contents of Crash Reports/submitted if you want a full reset.
6. Close the folder window and restart Firefox.

With the pending folder empty, Firefox has nothing left to ask you about, and the dialog should stop appearing.

These crash files are separate from your browsing history. If you also want to remove history, follow the steps to clear browsing history from Firefox.

What to try if the popup still appears

If the popup still appears after you disabled submission and set the environment variable, a leftover report in another Firefox profile is the most common cause. Open about:profiles in a tab and repeat the pending folder cleanup for each profile listed there.

Corrupt profile data can also keep the dialog coming back. A full refresh rebuilds the data reporting preferences from scratch and clears leftover crash files. See our guide to resetting Firefox browser settings on a computer for the steps.

As a last resort, a clean reinstall removes any file holding the remaining pending reports outside your profile. Our guide to uninstalling Firefox and deleting its stored files covers the full cleanup.

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