Firefox and other applications randomly crash giving an X error

Issue

• Firefox and other gtk applications randomly crash giving an X error as follows:

The program 'Gecko' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)'.
  (Details: serial 4584179 error_code 1 request_code 0 minor_code 0)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

• Following error messages seen in $HOME/.xsession-errors:

Xlib:  extension "SHAPE" missing on display ":0.0".