pkill -9 -f firefox won't work, what can be a possible explanation?
My friend was running firefox on linux mint, and it froze and he used xkill to kill firefox. But still it shows up in htopps -aux. He tried to kill it multiple times but it didn't work. See the pictures for explanation. We had to kill power to shutdown, even systemd can't stop that process.
Stuck in kernel code, possibly because they tripped an assert. Even if not, if your distribution enabled hung task detection, the kernel will log backtraces for these processes eventually; by default, after 2 minutes of being stuck.