280883 - hangs hard when pulling down several menus - _always_ when moving from open bookmarks menu to go menu

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[Loren]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050201 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050201 Firefox/1.0+

After I have been browsing for a period of time (not more than ten minutes) I
found that Firefox would suddenly becume completely unresponsive.

I detrmined that this would happen when I had been opening several menus in
succession.

I discovered that I could reproduce this problem consistently.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch Firefox.
2. Open the Bookmarks menu (mine is very long).
3. While the Bookmarks menu is open, move the pointer to the Go menu.
4. Wait...(program is unresponsive)

Actual Results:  
Pointer turns into the spinning pinwheel/beach ball. Program is unresponsive
(for more than five minutes). Must Force Quit.

Force Quit is difficult because entire system is unresponsive for up to two
minutes after the event.

Expected Results:  
Close the Bookmarks menu and open the Go menu...as Netscape Navigator and
Mozilla both do with no hesitation.

450MHz dual G4 ("gigabit ethernet"), System 10.3.7, New Firefox from nightly
build link, default theme.

The profile information is what was imported from Netscape. Holding down the
Option key while launching doen't bring up the profile manager as was
advertized. I know no other way to access this function.

My wife complains about Netscape. Safari looked like a likely alternative, but
it lacks a "back" item in the contextual menu, which my wife requires. Firefox
looked like the answer, but this constant hanging is a show-stopper.

Comment 1

[Ben Fowler]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050203
Firefox/1.0+

Mac OS X 10.2.6

I can't reproduce using your recipe. I have noticed something similar
when Mac OS X has many swapfiles, but I assumed that this was due to paging
whilst the menu system was in use - highly undesirable but not something
that can be laid at Firefox's door. Also, I have always seen this 
recovery after some time 10 minutes or so.

I have roughtly 1312 items in my bookmarks menu.

I am sorry to make work, but you could try Camino or the release version of
Firefox (and see whether either of these have the features your wife
needs).

Assuming that there are no Firefox extensions involved, you might want to try
runing Firefox as a different user, or after booting in Safe Mode (to see
whether there are any features of your Mac OS that are interacting
with Firefox.

Comment 2

[Ben Fowler]

See Bug 263407 "firefox crashes if bookmarks menu is clicked", though I suspect
that the problem described there does not occur in trunk builds, and this
is probably not a duplicate.

I would suggest that you check that you have sufficient free disk space
(in these days of huge disks, try to keep your startup disk less than half
full when you log in/log out), and adequate RAM. Panther seems to need less
than Jaguar, but 512 is realistically the minimum, and I would suggest
more than that if you can!

Also, use the disk utility to verify that your startup disk is free of
structural errors. In the past, I have used DiskWarrior with superlative
results to keep disks' catalog files in order and you may want to
do this; but I have no recent experience.

Comment 3

[doug]

(In reply to comment #2)
> See Bug 263407 "firefox crashes if bookmarks menu is clicked", though I suspect
> that the problem described there does not occur in trunk builds, and this
> is probably not a duplicate.
> 
> I would suggest that you check that you have sufficient free disk space
> (in these days of huge disks, try to keep your startup disk less than half
> full when you log in/log out), and adequate RAM. Panther seems to need less
> than Jaguar, but 512 is realistically the minimum, and I would suggest
> more than that if you can!
> 
> Also, use the disk utility to verify that your startup disk is free of
> structural errors. In the past, I have used DiskWarrior with superlative
> results to keep disks' catalog files in order and you may want to
> do this; but I have no recent experience.
> 
> 
> 
> 
Hello,

I had the same problem, Firefox crashing when I try to pull down the Bookmark
menu, through all versions of OS X and Firefox. The last time I installed the
program I got the idea that possibly the settings that I was importing from
other Mozilla browsers where somehow corrupt, so I installed Firefox without
importing them. This did the trick for me. I now have no problem pulling down
the Bookmark menu.

Comment 4

[Ben Fowler]

(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > See Bug 263407 "firefox crashes if bookmarks menu is clicked", ...
> > 
> I had the same problem, Firefox crashing when I try to pull down the Bookmark
> menu, through all versions of OS X and Firefox. ...  I now have no problem 
> pulling down the Bookmark menu.

Your problem (now resolved?) sounds like Bugzilla Bug 207636 "FF10 M17x - 
Search Bookmarks operation in Manage Bookmarks window crashes Mozilla if 
imported IE favorites were deleted 
[@ nsRDFConMemberTestNode::FilterInstantiations]
[@ nsFixedSizeAllocator::FindBucket][@ firefox-bin]"

After 5 months, this report is probably WORKSFORME, assuming that it has
not been seen by anyone else.