516326 - Mozilla Firefox freezes, and I need to alt+ctrl+del out and then recover the session.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[jeremybotto]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

When I recover the session, the bad webpage isn't there. It's as though I've hit the back button.  I can see the webpage I am trying to go to, also.  Weird, right?  I might have the wrong link.  So, I am posting the other posibility.  I'm almost positive it is the first one--
Yeah it's that one.  It's the only one I've visited for that google keyword.

I don't want to go back there.  I already foolishly stumbled into this site twice.  The same thing happened both times.  I have not tried to reproduce this bug on other computers.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.google keyword: detect character set in a .doc file
2.click International Character Set and File Encodings (the link)
3.watch firefox freeze.
Actual Results:  
You will continue to see the webpage on which Firefox freezes until you kill the process.  The program becomes totally unresponsive.  Alt+f4 does not work.

Expected Results:  
Well, it looked like some kind of help file with an index along the left side.  I suppose I should have been able to browse around in there or have gotten an error from firefox or from the site?  Hard to say.  But if you look at the additional info, below....  Maybe there's some way Firefox could chop pages up?  Any kind of predictive measure that would help users to avoid running into this problem would be nice.

If I view the cached page, it says "requested URL too large".  Perhaps it's just too much for my computer to handle.  I don't know if that's what caused the freeze, because this is the fastest machine I have.  If it is what caused the freeze, maybe firefox could chop the page's contents in half, somewhere, for me, or download the link's contents, instead of freezing?  I am marking the bug as critical, because it seems like the only sollution is to force firefox to die / kill the process.

Comment 1

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Works for me, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3

Jeremy, can you reproduce the problem in Firefox Safe Mode?
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode

Comment 2

[jeremybotto]

Yes, I can reproduce this in Safe Mode.

Comment 3

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Jeremy and Mats used the version of Firefox, both on WinXP and got different results. Safe Mode should have eliminated differences in addons, so maybe the difference is plugins?

Jeremy: please open the plugins tab of the Addons dialog (on the Tools menu) and report what plugins and versions you have. Alternately, open about:plugins and attach the contents to this bug (as a file attachment, not pasted as a comment!).

Comment 4

[Al Billings [:abillings - ex-MoCo]]

Resolving as incomplete due to lack of response from reporter for over two years.