354713 - Reuters Elections 2006 US Site hangs Firefox when trying to print/preview print

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 285608

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Joshua Kinard]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

I've already sent an email to Reuters regarding the issue, so it's possible they may correct this, but I have a scrapbooked copy that should trigger the issue as well (I'll double check this), and can upload as a test case if needed.

Essentially, when trying to print the page as-is, or using the print preview feature, Firefox hangs up on the tail-end of the printing phase, before it sends the document off to the printer.  Loading up Task Manager, the Firefox process starts to consume 99% CPU and eats about 400KB to 700KB of memory per second.  It's actually quite neat to watch the process run away like it is.

I've tested this on both a desktop system and a laptop, both running Windows XP SP2 and the latest Firefox (1.5.0.7).  The laptop is currently at 260MB consumed, and rising fast.  Gonna watch it until it brings the whole system down (just for kicks and giggles).



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Goto http://elections.us.reuters.com/
2. Bring up Windows Task Manager, sort by the CPU column, Ascending
3. Try to print the page.  Firefox hangs, starts to gobble memory.

Actual Results:  
Hangs, eats memory at a fast rate (400KB-700KB/sec)

Expected Results:  
Print the page or preview it (the Poll is kinda neat...)

Using the default theme; haven't tried other themes.  The laptop displaying the issue is a stock Firefox with no addons or extensions.  The desktop Firefox has a number of extensions (Adblock, ShowIP, IEView, Scrapbook, etc); both display the same problem.

Comment 1

[Joshua Kinard]

Attachment: Scrapbooked Reuters 2006 Elections site

Scrapbooked copy of the Reuters site that does reproduce the issue (incase it turns out to be an HTML error on their site triggering everything and they fix it).

Comment 2

[Joshua Kinard]

I got someone running Firefox on Linux to try the site out and print it to a file, and FF hangs for them too.  Making this a cross-platform issue now.

Comment 3

[Joshua Kinard]

Confirmed on MacOS X too.

Comment 4

[Wladimir Palant]

Confirming for Firefox 1.5 and trunk (nightly 2006100204 on Win XP SP2), moving to Core/Printing, changing severity to critical. Note that this bug can be reproduced with print preview as well. It seems that there is an issue with breaking the document into pages, as soon as I cut it down to one page it stops hanging.

This bug is likely a duplicate of bug 285608, it is difficult to test this however.

Comment 5

[Nicola Orritos]

I've reproduced the problem by using this URL: "http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/07/2012225".

I followed these steps:
1 - File > Print...
2 - <Printer selection>: I choosed Adobe PDF (Acrobat) virtual printer
3 - Ok
4 - Hanging and CPU high-loading in both in the case I confirmed the job and in the case I canceled it (Acrobat displays a "File save" dialog; there I confirm or I cancel the "job")

Running "Gran Paradiso" 3.0a3 on Windows XP SP2 ("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a3) Gecko/20070322 GranParadiso/3.0a3")