278935 - site specific browser crash takes down computer for MS-Win98 (at least)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Widget: Win32, defect)

Description

[Kent Paul Dolan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050116
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050116

This is a nasty crash. It has been repeatable in
nightly builds for more than two years now, and
is, I'm sure, mostly the fault of the site
maintainers.

When the referenced URL is accessed:

The page renders, then, without further user action:
The browser freezes.
The mouse freezes.
The computer locks up.
CTRL-ALT-DEL (Windows "reboot" command) is ignored.
Only a power recycle regains control of the machine.

In addition, in the latest try, it managed to munge
my DSL modem, so that I also had to power cycle _it_
to regain net access.

    The site is a mess, no matter how it is
    accessed.  When accessed in I.E. 6.x it is also
    unusable, but differently: first it tosses up a
    huge "stay behind the browser" popup ad, then it
    goes into a loop of "you need to reboot your
    computer to make settings changes take effect"
    requestors that cannot be silenced without
    closing I.E.

The site is a subscriber site at a commercial file
server ISP, where a friend of mine writes and puts
up for download some music files I try to access
from year to year, which is why I have such a long
history of it failing with Mozilla.

I'm fairly sure I've seen the same failure with
earlier Mozilla releases, but MS-WinXPsp1, a newer
OS release, as well.

I suspect their Javascript is the problem, somehow,
but I'm sure Mozilla should neither crash nor take
down the receiving computer based on HTTP data
received.

Let me know what added information would be useful.
Testing something that cold crashes my computer is
no picnic, and I have very few skills with
MS-Windows to bring to bear on the issues, so will
need click by click instructions.

xanthian.

As a comment, bugzilla needs a Boolean search
capability. Querying "crash computer" fetched too
many bugs to be a reasonable set for bug reporter
sifting before filing a report, all titles with
"crash" and all titles with "computer", when what
was wanted was only all titles with both.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Access URL with appropriate Mozilla and OS mix.
2. Watch computer freeze.
3.

Actual Results:  
Lost user control of computer, had to power cycle it to
regain control; some lossage of history also occurred,
but that is still an open bug 63292 these many years later.

Expected Results:  
Reported problems, retained control, refused to let the
problem propogate outside the application to the OS.


Nothing special, except don't test before saving everything
valuable in your current working set of applications.

Comment 1

[Jean-Marc Desperrier]

It does not crash me under 2000/XP.
I suspect your crash is related to the use of flash in the site to play music.

Could you test with : a fresh profile, firefox, the flash v7 plug-in to see if
you still have the problem in each case.

Comment 2

[Kent Paul Dolan]

(In reply to comment #1)

> It does not crash me under 2000/XP.

> I suspect your crash is related to the use of
> flash in the site to play music.

For as long as my session lasted, there _was_ no
music, and sound works find on my system. Are you
sure it was making such an attempt? I suspect that
any Flash in use is supporting the advertising map
mentioned below.

> Could you test with : a fresh profile, firefox,
> the flash v7 plug-in to see if you still have the
> problem in each case.

We'll work through those in the least painful order,
since I have no particular interest in firefox.

I went to the Macromedia site, downloaded the flash
v7 plug-in, closed Mozilla, installed the Flash v7
plugin, brought up Mozilla without rebooting, since
I just had.

My session at the reference URL survived long enough
with a fairly freshly re-booted computer to download
the song *.zip file that was my original goal, the
longest a visit to that page has ever endured.

I wasn't willing to stop testing there. I ran my
cursor over the busy ad rectangle near the top
center of the window, slowly enough to let the
roll-over flashes of various selections happen, once
right, then once left, then once right again.

By the time I got off the ad rectangle after the
third pass (never having clicked the mouse, my
session had frozen; the mouse wouldn't move, no
keystrokes were noticed.

Trying to close Mozilla with <control-alt-delete>
got me nothing, in particular, no Task Manager
window.

Trying again got me _three_ Blue Screens of Death.

The first, a familiar one when the machine is wedged
enough that the Task Manager can't be invoked, said
the machine was busy waiting for the "close box" (of
the Task Manager) to appear.

The second, which I've never seen before, said that
there wasn't enough memory for "the application";
ever helpful WinOS98SE didn't bother to tell me
whether that was the Mozilla application or the Task
Manager application.

Third one was the old familiar "your system has
become unstable" one.

After the third one was dismissed with a keystroke,
I got a black screen with a frozen cursor its only
feature, and got to use the front panel hardware
reboot button to recover.

Okay, the problem isn't the version of Flash in use.

I'll need help for the next part.

What's a "profile", how do I cause "a fresh one"

    [I just installed this 2005031305 nightly build
    14 hours or so ago, did that suffice?]

and what do I do as a backup so that making "a fresh
one" can be recovered back to whatever is my
"current stale one"? The only things I'm doing the
least bit special with my usual Mozilla setup are
that I have some very ordinary plug-ins, and I'm
using some fairly bland theme that gives a beige,
slightly rounded 3D effect; both the plugin kit
(though particular versions have upgraded) and the
theme have been in place for well over a year.

After that, how do I install Firefox without
munching the investment I have in Mozilla's
bookmarks and history? I found what looks like a
Firefox stable release at 1.0.1 here:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Is that the one you mean, or is there a nightly
build download for Firefox I should be using?

Comment 3

[Mark Tyndall]

(In reply to comment #2)
> 
[...]
> I'll need help for the next part.
> 
> What's a "profile", how do I cause "a fresh one"
> 
>     [I just installed this 2005031305 nightly build
>     14 hours or so ago, did that suffice?]
> 
> and what do I do as a backup so that making "a fresh
> one" can be recovered back to whatever is my
> "current stale one"?

A profile is everything that Mozilla remembers for you - bookmarks, themes,
history, mail accounts, etc.  Installing a newer build doesn't create a new profile.

To create a new profile, run 
mozilla.exe -p
This will launch the profile manager, letting you create and use a new profile.
Your existing profile will not be affected (you can have multiple profiles on
one machine, which won't affect each other.

Comment 4

[Kent Paul Dolan]

(In reply to comment #3)

Okay, I ran mozilla.exe -p from the "command" prompt,
created a new clean profile "testing", Mozilla came
up, I made the window full screen, went to this
bugzilla page to pick up the offending URL, opened it,
a prompt came up "About Popups" telling me the site
had tried to open a popup, and the computer was at that
point frozen, the mouse cursor wouldn't move, <alt>-y
wouldn't dismiss the About Popups requestor,
<control-alt-del> would not evoke the Task Manager or
let me "Shutdown", and only a poke at the front panel
hardware reboot button got me back in control. When I
next opened Mozilla, profile "testing" had gotten lost,
but the fact that I'd created a new profile was still
remembered, so even though the only profile was now
"default", I was still asked to select a profile before
Mozilla would finish its startup -- annoying.

So, a fresh profile doesn't change the bug behavior,
the 2005031304 Mozilla nightly for MS-Windows still
cold-crashes MS-WinOS98SE when the offending URL is
opened.

Now, once again, is there a Firefox "nightly" hidden
somewhere you want me to install and test, or is the
stable Firefox 1.01 the one I should try?

xanthian.

Comment 5

[Mark Dowling]

WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050217
WFM IE 6.0.2900.2180
WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223
Firefox/1.0.1
Flash 7.0.19, XPSP2

Google for Process Explorer - a Windows 98 utility I am very fond of. Task
manager for 98. Might give an indication of what's bringing the house down. I
would back up your mozilla program directory and profile directory and rename
them, and do a fresh install of moz18b.

Comment 6

[Andrew Schultz]

worksforme with linux suite trunk 2005040201

Can you try uninstalling flash?

It's highly unlikely that firefox would behave differently from the suite. 
Firefox 1.0.x is actually older than the build you already have.  Nightly builds
are here although the build you already have (1.8b) is pretty recent:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/nightly/latest-trunk/
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

What's needed is a testcase (minimal html page) that triggers the bug.

Comment 7

[Kent Paul Dolan]

(In reply to comment #6)
> worksforme with linux suite trunk 2005040201
> Can you try uninstalling flash?

I am unfortunately now away from the computer
on which the crash happened, permanently, and
engaged in a 1000 km move-by-bicycle, dragging
200 kg of luggage on a 3.3 meter trailer, so
I'm out of the testing loop.

> It's highly unlikely that firefox would behave differently from the suite. 
> Firefox 1.0.x is actually older than the build you already have.  Nightly 
builds
> are here although the build you already have (1.8b) is pretty recent:
> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/nightly/latest-trunk/
> http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/
> What's needed is a testcase (minimal html page) that triggers the bug.

I can't construct that since I don't have the skills to create even the
map layout on the erring page that is in my mind a likely candidate. I
know MS-Win98SE is anything but a developer's choice of platform for
now, and so it may be hard for one of you to replicate the problem, and
then to trim down that page. Tor Lillqvist, the moderator of the GIMP
for Windows group [e-mail] has what he calls a "VM" that
lets him run multiple version of MS-Windows/Linux at once (he's also a
GIMP developer). Perhaps one of you could coordinate with him to set up
a similar configuration on your computers.

As busy as the offending URL is, it's possible that it is simply exausting,
all by itself, one of the "handle" type resources that are fairly scarce
in MS-Win98SE, explaining why it would be WFM on Linux. More likely, though,
is that the folks running it are simply incompetent, and have installed
wrapper HTML/Javascript around the customers' part of the page that violates
good coding practice. The particular customer's comments on the competence
or responsiveness of the site maintainer aren't even printable, and she's
otherwise a nice lady.

xanthian.

Comment 8

[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
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 9

[Kent Paul Dolan]

Is this bug really to be abandoned just because the original
reporter is no longer available to be a tester?

Reportedly, MS-Windows is ~95% of the installed PC OS-base,
and reportedly, versions MS-Win98SE and before are half of
that 95%. If _no_ Mozilla developer has a Win98 system on
which to reproduce problems reported from those who refuse
to throw good money after bad upgrading along the MS-Windows
OSen pathway, then over 40% of Mozilla's potential customer
base lack any feasible support. This is Not A Good Thing.

FWIW

xanthian.

Comment 10

[alanjstr]

WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050929
Firefox/1.6a1 
Shockwave Flash 7.0 r19

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

WFM SM 1.1.1 + win98

Comment 12

[Kent Paul Dolan]

Works for me now as well, in my current setup
[64 bit WinXP Media Center 2005 on an AMD Turion
64 chipset], possibly due to cleanups on the
NewGrounds javascript embedding end, possibly
due to real SeaMonkey fixes. I can't test it in
my old Win98 Intel chipset lashup, unfortunately,
which melted its power connector and died.

xanthian.