1544229 - Selecting all history entries causes Firefox to freeze

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1067546

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[rugk]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go into the library for history/bookmarks. (Ctrl+Shift+O on Linux at least)
2. Search for ":" in the history section to list all entries.*
3. Now Ctrl+A

* This has been inspired by https://superuser.com/a/1194427/522670 respectively http://kb.mozillazine.org/Counts_-_Counting_bookmarks_history_links_and_other_data_-_Firefox.

Actual results:

Firefox freezes for several seconds (yes, everything, each window!) and you cannot do anything.
In my case, GNOME even showed the "Firefox is not responding" message.

Expected results:

At least, possibly only freeze the library window?
Or, better, make the user aware of what they do and show a warning or so?

Or, best, just not freeze… ;)

After all, it just needs to count the entries. Nothing else is shown after the process finished.

I suspect it internally iterates over all entries and this can be a little computationally expensive…

Comment 1

[rugk]

(After all the search itself also took a few seconds, which is understandable, but it seems in that time Firefox is can 100%ly respond to my clicks or so.)

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I suspect the problem is likely not iterating to count, but the select event.