468029 - cannot download files from scribd.com

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[bzb.dev001]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008103100 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008103100 Firefox/3.0.4

when viewing a document in scribd.com, there is a link labeled 'download' whose underlying action is 'javascript:void(0)'.  When the user clicks on this link, a dropdown menu is supposed to show containing a link to initiate download of the document.  When firefox is used with this website, nothing happens when the user clicks on the link labeled 'download'

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[ebin]

User-Agent:       Firefox 3.5.6 (Windows 7 upon an Atom 1.66GHz with 2GB RAM)

browser freezes or hangs extremely long when opening or interacting with some document pages in scribd.com

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open http://www.scribd.com/doc/7359984/KannadaKali20072
2. click the 'Download' button: a "Download this document as [ps/pdf/txt]" frame pops up - choose "as text"
3. a "Log in or Sign up" frame then pops up, enter valid login credentials,
4. the front frame then says "Login successful. Now bringing you back..." and after a while the browser displays a page "Give back to the Scribd community"
5. click "Continue download" - the rest of the process is smooth, the downlad is very quick - a 14 KB file.

Failure or hour-long latency occur with steps 2, 3, 4.


Notes: 
- tried same steps with other browsers:
with Explorer 6 (on Windows XP), step 1 takes more than a minute, and step 4 takes 3 mn (first half of this time the CPU is idle, the second half it's 50-60% loaded) ;
with Chrome (on Windows 7- the whole system was already quite heavily loaded, with two other browsers and lots of pages opened), step 3: entering the credentials in the login popup was extremely slow, characters appearing minutes after i typed them;
with Firefox 3.0 Firefox 3.0 (on Windows XP Professional SP2 upon an Intel E2140 1.60GHz with 500MB RAM) things went relatively smoothly;

- having sent this problem description to Scribd support, i received this answer:
<< There appears to be a problem with this particular document that is causing our document viewer to become confused and use too many resources.>>

Comment 2

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Reporter, please retest with Firefox 3.6.12 or later in a fresh profile (http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles). Also update your plugins (flash, adobe reader, java, quicktime, silverlight, etc.) Go to the developer's website and download the latest version from there. If you no longer see this issue, please close this bug as RESOLVED, WORKSFORME. If you do see the bug, please post a comment.

Comment 3

[Pranav Kant [:pranavk]]

Eg: while opening this file, the UI hangs :

https://www.scribd.com/doc/229115299/eBook-EnG-Introduction-to-Data-Mining-P-N-Tan-M-Steinbach-V-Kumar-2005#scribd