420239 - Closing Gmail causes the browser to hang

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Ben]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b3) Gecko/2008020513 Firefox/3.0b3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b3) Gecko/2008020513 Firefox/3.0b3

One of the things I like best about Firefox 3 is it's fast Javascript parsing. Gmail is so much faster now!

However, when I close Gmail the whole browser becomes unresponsive, especially if I have other sites open that use Javascript or Flash.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log in to Gmail.
2. Open another tab with heavy client side scripting, such as http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/dice/dice.html
3. Close the Gmail tab.
Actual Results:  
The browser becomes unresponsive.

Expected Results:  
The browser should remain snappy. Closing a Javascript heavy page should immediately purge the Javascript from memory. Keep it in cache if that's what the user prefers, but stop parsing.

Comment 1

[Daniel Andrlik]

I can confirm that this happens for me as well.

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008031115 (Gentoo) Firefox/3.0b4

This happens with both a binary installed directly from Mozilla as well as compiled version.  It doesn't seem to matter what other tabs I have open.

Comment 2

[Daniel Andrlik]

Found my problem.  I thought I had checked against all my extensions but I found a rogue one causing the problem.  Next time I'll try in safe mode before posting.

Comment 3

[Ben]

This appears to be fixed in Firefox 3 beta 4. I am not a Mozilla dev, so I haven't done any exhaustive tests or looked at the code, but I have not encountered any hangs today. I'm resolving this bug to fixed.

Great job devs. I really appreciate all the fabulous work you've done.