272073 - After importing huge number of IE bookmarks, Firefox will not load, freezes and crashes.

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[reece]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

When installing firefox on a friends computer, (this one), I imported IE's
settings.  Then when I started firefox, it loaded, and the 4 bookmarks that
actually showed up all started with "!" or "#", and were advertisment related. 
the large number of bookmarks being loaded caused firefox to freeze and crash.

I deleted the profile folder, and restarted firefox but without importing IE's
stuff, and it worked fine.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have a huge number of bookmarks (I have no idea how many, but probably hundreds)
2. Run Firefox with the default setup including bookmark bar showing.

Actual Results:  
firefox crashed.

Expected Results:  
No crash.

This was a computer that was infested with spyware which I had removed, but the
bookmarks were left behind I guess.  Interestingly, they didn't show up in IE,
so i'm not sure where Firefox found them to import.  SP2 was installed, so maybe
that had something to do with it.

Comment 1

[reece]

After looking at the "favorites" folder in windows, I've confirmed there were
over 17,000 bookmarks.  I realize that is ludacris, but many spyware infested
systems may have the same thing (this is left after an Ad-Aware run).  A check
on the number of bookmarks, or a cap to how many will load should fix the problem.

Comment 2

[timeless]

do you really mean crashes? a crash means that the app quits and the os tosses
up a dialog saying that the app quit. ideally if talkback is working, it too
comes up and offers to report the problem. did this happen?

Comment 3

[reece]

My homepage would not load, and the toolbars took like 15 seconds to load.  Then
it did the "program not responding" thing in the windows title bar of the
program window.  I didn't wait for the end program dialog to come up, I just hit
ctl-alt-del and did it myself. I did do that 3 times though, after looking in IE
and seeing no reason why the bookmarks it was showing should be advertisments. 
I didn't have talkback installed unfortunatly, and I didn't have time to do it
later due to it not being my computer and it being the holidays.  (sorry!)

Also, I discovered the reason the ad bookmarks were not showing up in IE, was
they were "hidden" files in the favorites folder.  IE would ignore them, but
firefox still imported all 17,000 of them.

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I doubt we're crashing, we just don't scale well to 17000 bookmarks.  Depending
on machine specs, I could see 17000 bookmarks taking 10-20 minutes or even
longer to finish loading.

If you look at the bookmarks.html in the profile, how big is it?  I know I
tested a 2.5 MB file on an older system, and it took a very long time to load (>
10 minutes).  I would suspect that 17000 bookmarks is much bigger than 2.5 MB.

Comment 5

[reece]

Well, perhaps it was not a crash then, and the priority may need to be dropped.
However, it is still something that is a problem.  I know if I was using Firefox
for the first time, and it crashed on startup, I'd say to hell with it.

Unfortunatly, I don't have access to the computer anymore, and deleted both the
imported bookmarks and the IE ones before I left, so checking the details of the
situation is no longer possible.  I do know they had Gator installed for over 2
years, which is probably the source of it.

I suppose I'll drop my bug claim to the fact that importing hidden file
bookmarks is just not a good idea.  Even IE ignored them, and the fact that they
can make the browser even appear to crash/freeze is a very bad thing since
firefox is probably one of the first things to be installed on a newly
spyware-cleaned system (Note that these bookmarks were NOT removed after the
Ad-Aware run, and so even a cleaned system could be effected by this).

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.

Comment 8

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change