379084 - <applet></applet> causes browser to hang

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Matthew Ratzloff]

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

A webpage containing "<applet></applet>" (no attributes, no child tags) hangs Firefox.  It appears to search forever for the applet, when in fact none has been specified.

As a result, the application becomes extremely unresponsive (to the point of hanging).  Closing it does not end the process, which must be killed manually.

There may be other methods of reproducing this error.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a webpage containing the HTML, "<applet></applet>"
2. Load the page
Actual Results:  
Extreme slowdown, hanging

Expected Results:  
Handle the error gracefully.

* Ignore the tag altogether.
* Do not load the JRE but render the object (a la Opera 9)
* Load the JRE but do not instantiate a class--instead, showing an error icon (a la Internet Explorer 7)

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Could you attach a testcase or mention a page where this happens?

Comment 2

[Adam Guthrie]

Do you happen to be using Adblock (Plus)?

Comment 3

[Matthew Ratzloff]

I've tracked this down to a bug in the "IE Tab" add-on, of all things (when using Gecko!).  When it's disabled, the page loads as expected.

Sorry for the false alarm.  I'll contact the author of that extension and mark this invalid.

Thanks!

Comment 4

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

Thanks for tracking that down and reporting back!