force firefox to crash or trick firefox into thinking it has crashed on windows

Solution 1:

You can install this user style to crash Firefox http://userstyles.org/styles/90455/crash-firefox

Solution 2:

Another way to do it (actually Mozilla's way)

Go to about:config and turn devtools.chrome.enabled to true

Open Scratchpad with Shift+F4

Switch Environment to Browser and run the following snippet

Cu.import("resource://gre/modules/ctypes.jsm");
let zero = new ctypes.intptr_t(8);
let badptr = ctypes.cast(zero, ctypes.PointerType(ctypes.int32_t));
badptr.contents;

Crash!

Solution 3:

In windows 10 I have just used Taskkill /IM firefox.exe /F to /Forcefully close firefox in a "bad way" (meaning: a chance of data loss i.e. The current tabs & session) which seems to successfully cause the program to display the tab recovery prompt or perform similar action. See Taskkill /? for more information.

In debian linux I can use killall -9 firefox to kill all firefox processes simultaneously since it uses many processes to run. This should produce an identical result.

Solution 4:

This is made by Mozilla themselves:

http://archive.mozilla.org/pub/utilities/crashfirefox-intentionally/crashfirefox.exe

== crashfirefox-intentionally --

Tool for QA/testers to intentionally crash Firefox in a way that should cause the crash reporter to start.

See https://github.com/bsmedberg/crashfirefox-intentionally for more details.