339806 - Browser crashes at globeandmail.com

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Greg Colyer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060414
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060414

Opening pages at globeandmail.com sometimes causes Mozilla browser to freeze and then crash.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://globeandmail.com/
2. Open some articles in other tabs
3. Select articles and scroll through them

Actual Results:  
At some point, Mozilla freezes and then crashes.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla works normally.

Problem started when The Globe and Mail redesigned their web site. Perhaps belongs under Tech Evangelism, but seems too serious for that until cause identified.

Comment 1

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

Talkback id?  Don't assign bugs to a component unless you have some evidence blaming that component.

/be

Comment 2

[Greg Colyer]

In fact, initially I didn't assign a component, thus receiving the following message:

> To file this bug, you must first choose a component. If necessary, just guess.

And no, I don't know a Talkback id.

Comment 3

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> In fact, initially I didn't assign a component, thus receiving the following
> message:
> 
> > To file this bug, you must first choose a component. If necessary, just guess.

That's bad advice, cc'ing Gerv.  Mozilla Application Suite / General is much better than guessing.

> And no, I don't know a Talkback id.

Do you have talkback installed?  If you can find a talkback.exe in with the program files and run it, it should list any crashes it sent, or tried to send.

/be

Comment 4

[Adam Guthrie]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Talkback might be helpful, too.

And for what it's worth, you might want to test this in a newer version of SeaMonkey. The Suite is dead, and is not going to be resurrected.

Comment 5

[timeless]

greg: that advice still means you somehow entered a bug in the core component. how did you come to file a bug in core? the normal list at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided certainly doesn't list core.

fwiw the message comes from http://lxr.mozilla.org/webtools/source/bugzilla/template/en/default/global/user-error.html.tmpl#1175 and we clearly should have a custom for the format=guided

we can fork this off into another bug, but until you provide a talkback incident id, this bug is fairly useless and i'd rather resolve a problem (and bad user reporting paths is a big problem).

unfortunately your crash is in code that's at least 2 years old (please test a seamonkey nightly or seamonkey1.0/1.5 branch release/nightly) - be sure to install talkback. the odds are fairly good that whatever crash you're hitting is already reported in bugzilla.

Comment 6

[Greg Colyer]

Instead of asking the reporter to reproduce the problem with a different installation, why not do so yourself? In this particular case, the instructions are pretty easy to follow. There exist Mozilla supporters who are willing to contribute to the community by reporting bugs, but who may not be willing -- or even able -- to change the software they are using. Please be careful not to treat such people with disrespect. (I am sensitive to this issue since a whole bunch of open bugs were automatically "resolved" simply because of low traffic, and the implication was made that it was up to the reporter to keep the bug alive. Once a bug has been reported, it belongs to the whole community, which shouldn't place additional burdens on people who are already doing more than they have to. Those people may get the impression that reporting alone is not worth doing, and give up.)

For what it's worth, I haven't seen this bug recently (with SeaMonkey 1.0). But of course the site may also have changed.

I guess I chose Core because it seemed the most appropriate. It often is (and there are many bugs unnecessarily replicated between Mozilla/SeaMonkey and Firefox/Thunderbird). Core does not imply Trunk.

Comment 7

[Arun Prasannan (polar)]

Yeah, works for me too.