307917 - Arbitrarily long pages exhaust memory

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Manuel Lemos]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050715 Firefox/1.0.6 SUSE/1.0.6-4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050715 Firefox/1.0.6 SUSE/1.0.6-4

Accidentally I wrote a script that generates a very long page with debug
information of a Web application. Firefox exhausted the browser machine memory
and  I had to kill it before the system became unusable.

It seems to me that any malicious site can crash the user machine just by
serving an arbitrarily long page.

Shouldn't there be a protection to prevent that Firefox exhausts the system memory?

Maybe there should be a limit option that stop loading pages when the available
system memory is below some threshold.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Niels Madsen]

I think this "bug" is more of a general design issue than a firefox bug
specefically, i know it has happened to me with other browsers too.
A memory limit option would probably be the best solution, either stop loading
the page or automatically close the program.

Comment 2

[zug_treno]

Related to Suite bug 70821?

Comment 3

[tech]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; fr-FR; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20060116 - Build ID: null
I've found a good example to illustrate this problem :
just try to load 
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/Contents-i386.gz
and wait for your system to crash ;(

Comment 4

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Reporter, do you still see this problem with the latest Firefox 2? If not, can you please close this bug as WORKSFORME. Thanks!

Comment 5

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Comment 3 is covered in other bugs. We need a valid testcase to determine exactly where Firefox is misusing memory. I'm closing this bug as INCOMPLETE until the reporter produces the page which he was talking about in comment 0.