576385 - IETab2 (2.5.10.1) Causes Infinite Hang with MS Sharepoint Sites Since FF 3.6.4

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(External Software Affecting Firefox :: Other, defect)

Description

[myownlittlworld]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6

With particular Sharepoint pages, IETab2 (2.5.10.1) can cause Firefox to hang and become completely unresponsive forever.

This appears to be a change in FF that allowed this hang to surface - either way, whether or not IETab2 is designed correctly, it shouldn't be able to hang FF.  Presumably, other situations could also cause this same hang.

A workaround for resolving the crash is noted on the extension's page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/92382/

1. Go to about:config.
2. Add a new boolean value named "dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npietab2.dll" and set it to True.

If I can find a shareable (non-confidential) Sharepoint page that causes this crash, I'll add it to the bug.  Hopefully somebody else has access to SP for debugging purposes.

Marking as "Critical" per the severity description.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Navigate to affected Sharepoint page.
2. Click the FF logo to open in IETab2.
3. Watch FF stop responding and hang indefinitely.
Actual Results:  
FF becomes completely unresponsive, page never loads.

Expected Results:  
IETab2 loads the page in a new IE Tab, as expected.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

A plugin can always hang/freeze or crash the browser except with the new OOPP feature. Your posted "workaround" is that you enable the OOPP feature for this plugin.
An extension can only freeze/hang Firefox (valid for JS/HTML/XUL Extensions) but it can crash the browser like plugins if it contains binary components.

This seems to be an invalid report (bug in tne Addon) but you may want to attach a stack trace.
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en/How_to_get_a_stacktrace_with_WinDbg

Comment 2

[myownlittlworld]

Nope, you're absolutely right.  It is the addon.  After enabling OOPP and letting it hang out, the your-plugin-has-crashed page appears.

Apologies for the noise.

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

This addon is special, it's both an extensions and a plugin.
The extension part can still freeze the browser but the browser can survive a plugin hang or crash with the new "out of process plugin" feature.
The hang detection for plugins is 45s with 3.6.6 and that is a long time. We had 10s in 3.6.4 but many older systems reported issues with large flash applets and the 10s to 45s change is the only difference between 3.6.4 and 3.6.6

The option for this hang detection is dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs

You have to whitelist every plugin because this is a new feature and some plugins may have problems with it. As first step only flash, silverlight and quicktime are AFAIK whitelisted by default.

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

Version and milestone values are being reset to defaults as part of product refactoring.