484654 - Holding F1 opens many help tabs -> Crashes browser

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 475358

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[dolphinling]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090321 Minefield/3.6a1pre ID:20090321032950
(And Firefox 3.0.X on Windows)

If F1 is held down, the help tab is opened over and over again. Even a 1 second press is enough to make around 25 (very annoying to close); if it's held down too long, the browser will run out of memory and crash.



My cats LOVE the F1 key.

Comment 1

[timeless]

in theory ctrl-n, ctrl-t, or various other things would cause this too....

that said, i can understand not wanting dozens of tabs for help (i often trigger it on broken [i.e. ibm] keyboards).

key navigation is for something else. since f1 is mapped to help>help contents, i'm moving this to menus....

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Reporter, do you have a crash report available?

Comment 3

[dolphinling]

No crash report, sorry. My computer wasn't the one that crashed, and I don't see the report on the one that did. That said, it's probably just an out of memory death.

I can try to get it all the way to crashing again, but it turns out firefox is pretty memory efficient, and that's hard to do on a box with 2GB ram. Who knew? I'll try using up ram with some other stuff first, maybe.

Comment 4

[Dan]

I have this problem, too. It is inconvenient to close all those extra tabs. I propose that if the Help page is already the current tab, F1 or "Help" should either reload it, or do nothing.

Comment 5

[Bartosz Wucke]

Confirming problem, not crash (but I guess crash would be likely given some time) Not exact duplicate - tabs are opened about 1 per second.
Windows 7 x64, 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; pl; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6

I left my earphones on my keyboard, pressing on the F1 and went to get some food. As I was back maybe 3 minutes later, I had some 150 (roughly) tabs open, Firefox slowed down to a crawl and extremely unresponsive as old tabs were loading content.

Suggested fix: if one help tab is open already, F1 should focus it instead of reopening.

Note while accidentally pressing down and holding ctrl+t for prolonged periods of time is very unlikely, having the exposed F1 key depressed by anything laying around is quite a common event.

Comment 7

[Bartosz Wucke]

While on other OSes this is a mere annoyance, as the new tabs don't freeze the UI, on Linux this is browser freeze.
I held F1 for some 10s on FF2.5.6, Ubuntu Netbook, about 10 minutes ago. As it froze, it doesn't show any intentions of unfreezing and reacting to UI in any way.