378630 - Firefox crashes on need of Viewpoint

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Plugins Graveyard :: Viewpoint Media Player, defect)

Description

[Duane Wills]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

When you go to a site that requires Viewpoint, and you don't have it, Firefox crashes. No prompt for plugin finding. No error message. Just no Firefox.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have Vista
2. Have Firefox (latest build)
3. Go to site, like Toyota.com's individual vehicle pages
Actual Results:  
Crash.

Expected Results:  
Ask to install plugin.

Comment 1

[Doron Rosenberg (IBM)]

-> plugins

Comment 2

[Adam Guthrie]

Can you get a Talkback ID for the crash? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Talkback

Comment 3

[Duane Wills]

It doesn't call the agent up. I have it enabled.

Comment 4

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

wfm, no crash with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4pre) Gecko/2007042403 BonEcho/2.0.0.4pre

Comment 5

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

wfm as well using, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/2007030919 Firefox/2.0.0.3. I surfed to this demo and installed the plugin, http://www.viewpoint.com/demos/sony_style/, and did not see any issue on that site or the toyota.com site. Do have any extensions installed that may be interfering?

Comment 6

[Duane Wills]

The only thing I have that is enabled in the nightlies is Adblock Plus. I have the plugin installed now, so I don't know what it would do without it. Don't take this too seriously, as I know this is a devoted threat, but Fx needs a GUI for plugin management. If this many people aren't having problems, I'd consider it fixed, maybe necessitating an email to the authors of incompatible extensions, although the framework of Fx really shouldn't allow an extension to CRASH anything, ala an application bringing down an OS.

Comment 7

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Duane: The other thing I noticed is the Viewpoint's site doesn't specifically mention support of Vista->http://www.viewpoint.com/technologies/viewpoint-media-player.shtml#system-requirements.
On my lab test machine I actually got a dialog indicating the plugin wasn't supported. So that is one issue that may factor into this. But your bug reminded me that a lot of sites use Viewpoint, and our manual testing tool doesn't have test cases that cover this territory, so I will be writing some.

Comment 8

[Wladimir Palant]

I finally found a page on toyota.com that required ViewPoint, and it is the same as with the demo page Marcia cites above - the page doesn't even try to load the object, it probably uses navigator.plugins collection to detect that the plugin is not installed. For that reason I find it hard to believe that Adblock Plus has anything to do with the crash. No crash here either (Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4pre Gecko/2007041804 BonEcho/2.0.0.4pre), I got to the point of downloading the installer without any obvious issues.

Comment 9

[Wladimir Palant]

Duane: Are you sure you didn't have a (probably broken) installation of Viewpoint already?

Comment 10

[Adam Guthrie]

Now that I think of it, wouldn't that fact that Talkback didn't fire suggest that the crash was in the plug-in itself and not Firefox?

Comment 11

[Wladimir Palant]

No, Talkback usually works for crashes in plugins as well. I have seen only a few cases where it wouldn't appear. Not sure what causes this, must be corruption of memory areas required by Talkback.

Comment 12

[Duane Wills]

@Wladimir, unless it came with Vista Home Premium, no. Got the computer -> installed Firefox -> went to Toyota -> crashed Firefox -> went to (some other auto manufacturer (GM?) -> crashed Firefox -> went to BugZilla. As for my original problem, I'm good. I manually installed Viewpoint, but only because I knew it was what I needed. Anyone else would have assumed a Fx bug and crash.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

can you reproduce this unconfirmed problem using newest firefox 3.x or 3.1 beta?
 http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> incomplete due to no response.  not clear to me that toyota.com still uses Viewpoint

If you still see problem using (preferably) the current beta** of 3.1, please
comment, with specific URL/page 
**http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html