402371 - URL opening sometimes fails with no error (blank page, no CSS...), session not correctly restored

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9

After using Firefox for a few hours or days, the opening of URLs starts to fail randomly, leading to blank pages and to pages with no CSS and/or no images. The failure seems to occur immediately. The only thing I can do is to restart Firefox, but I can't always quit Firefox normally: sometimes, nothing happens, and I need to type "killall firefox-bin" in a shell. The session is not restored exactly as it was before Firefox was killed.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use Firefox for a few hours or days.
Actual Results:  
Pages appear as blank or with no CSS and/or with no images. I get no error messages. The web site doesn't matter.

Expected Results:  
Pages should be loaded or one should get an error message.

These problems started to appear with Firefox 2.0.0.7 or 2.0.0.8.

Comment 1

[Vincent Lefevre]

This problem still occurs with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11.

Comment 2

[Vincent Lefevre]

This problem still occurs with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12. In addition to that, the Window menu was showing blank entries. And the "Live HTTP headers" extension was no longer working: when clicking on the menu item, its window didn't appear.

Comment 3

[Vincent Lefevre]

This problem still occurs with: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

After restart, an old session is restored, which can be very old.

It seems that the problem mainly occurs some time after opening pages from http://sports.fr/ (I don't know whether this site does anything special except having the bad habits to reload pages every minute).

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Are you on a consumer grade switch at home?
Can you reproduce with the latest v3.1 beta?
 http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
 (backup your profile first)

Comment 5

[Vincent Lefevre]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Are you on a consumer grade switch at home?

The router is a Netopia 3347W and is regarded as having good quality. I don't think such problems are related to it since:
* I've never seen any such problem with my other machines also at home (Linux-based and RISC OS-based), and other connections such as SSH are very reliable.
* Once the problem occurs, it almost always occurs until I restart Firefox (and in general, Firefox can't even quit normally).
* When the page is loaded, but not the CSS (bad layout...): I've just noticed that Shift-Reload can help (but not always), whereas a simple reload has no effect.
* Also the problem seems to occur more often with lots of tabs open (e.g. about 50).

> Can you reproduce with the latest v3.1 beta?

I haven't tried yet, but it still occurs with:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.9) Gecko/2009040820 Firefox/3.0.9

The problem can happen after less than 2 hours of use.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

knowing it doesn't happen with other apps is useful, but unfortunately doesn't completely eliminate the possibility that software may be pushing the hardware to some breaking point.

this  and 424337 need a retest using v3.6 or trunk. 3.5 and 3.0 are history.
 trunk ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/
 3.6 ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-1.9.2/

Any reason to not fold this into bug 424337?

Comment 7

[Vincent Lefevre]

(In reply to comment #6)
> knowing it doesn't happen with other apps is useful, but unfortunately doesn't
> completely eliminate the possibility that software may be pushing the hardware
> to some breaking point.

But other users have noticed the same problem, including on an x86 Mac BTW (bug 430941, which describes, just like bug 424337, the same problem as this one). So, this is definitely not a hardware fault.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

please test with direct connection to router (not wireless) using FF 3.6.  Results?

Comment 9

[Vincent Lefevre]

When I had this problem, this was always with a direct connection to the router (Ethernet cable). But I haven't noticed this problem for several months (probably since FF 3.5 or 3.6). The bug can be closed.