464360 - Firefox crashes when loading any page containing a java applet (including above URL)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Plugins Graveyard :: Java (Java Embedding Plugin), defect)

Description

[Glenn Brauen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_4_11; en) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.22
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081111 Minefield/3.1b2pre

Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.11)
Java for Mac OS X 10.4, Release 7

It appears that any page containing an applet that I visit using Firefox crashes Firefox and launches the Mozilla CrashReporter.  One example is listed in the above URL.

Problem has appeared on several systems within the last week.  All are running 10.4.11 and were upgraded with "Java for Mac OS X 10.4, Release 7" 4 days ago.  Unfortunately, I don't have admin privileges on these systems so can't try to back out the recent Java release 7 upgrade to verify if that introduced the problem.

Problem first noticed with Firefox 3.0.3 and then reproduced with Nov. 11, 2008 build of Minefield.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Follow above URL or that URL can also be reached by typing "about:plugins" in the nav bar, finding the listing of mime types supported by the "Java Embedding Plugin 0.9.6.5", and following the "Java Information" link above the table which points at http://gemal.dk/browserspy/java.html.  
2.That page will begin to load but firefox will crash when it tries to load the embedded applet.
Actual Results:  
Firefox crashed.

Expected Results:  
Load the applet.

Comment 1

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I just tested on my MacBook Pro, running OS X 10.4.11 and the save Java
version you have (Java for Mac OS X 10.4, Release 7) -- I had no problems
loading the Java applet at http://gemal.dk/browserspy/java.html.

I tested with FF 3.0.3 and today's Minefield nightly (the same ones you tested
with).

(I also tested on OS X 10.5.5 and had no problems.)

Maybe you should check what other changes your machine's admin had made
recently.

Comment 2

[Glenn Brauen]

> Maybe you should check what other changes your machine's admin had made
> recently.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I can't add much else right now - security update 2008-007 was added but it doesn't look like anything that would cause what I'm seeing.

Comment 3

[Glenn Brauen]

Above report was generated while working on a duo-core intel iMac.

I'm now working on a G4 powerbook (10.4.11).  Release 7 of Java for Mac has been installed on this system since September 25 and I have had no problems with Java until today when I tried to reproduce the results I was seeing in the lab yesterday.

I DO see the same problem on this system.  I have done a system cleanup (repair disk permissions, etc.), wiped out all Firefox preferences and application support, reinstalled Firefox3, started up without importing preferences from another browser, and still the problem exists.  For example, any of the applets at:

http://java.sun.com/applets/jdk/1.4/index.html

cause the browser to crash.

Note that on this system I can't even load the "about:plugins" page as that kills Firefox3 (i.e., before getting to the java applet that I originally reported was causing the problems).  I'll look for an existing report concerning that next...

The above java applet example pages work when loaded using Safari3 (so my Java install seems reasonably sane).  That was also true of the iMac systems I was using yesterday.

Comment 4

[Glenn Brauen]

Upgraded to Firefox 3.0.4 and the problem persists.  Also tried switching Java configuration to use Java 1.4.2.  Problem persists in that case as well.

Comment 5

[Glenn Brauen]

Searched around for information on this issue again.  Found this post from March 2008 that suggested removing jai_imageio.jar from ~/Library/Java/Extensions.  This cleared the problem.

http://osdir.com/ml/gis.gvsig.english/2008-03/msg00071.html

I'm not sure how jai_imageio.jar got installed but an installation of uDig is a possibility.