597325 - Broken/infinite cookie confirmation dialogues

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 430006

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[S A]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100824 Firefox/3.6.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100824 Firefox/3.6.9

I have recently encountered a bug wherein the cookie confirmation dialog box will pop up as broken (no domain identified; 3 of 5 buttons un-labeled) while apparently spawning infinite copies of itself.  It is impossible to dismiss them all.  The only solution I have found is to option-command-ESC force quit Firefox, and when Session Manager offers to re-start my session after the crash, systematically remove any recently-added tabs from my list of open tabs until the problem is eliminated.  I have not been able to narrow it down to a specific domain that causes it; the most recent crash was, I believe, caused by a cookie sent by seg.sharethis.com on the L.A. Times website.  News sites seem to typically be associated with this issue.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Go to news.google.com or another site containing multiple news links.
2.  Open a number of news articles in new tabs using command-click.
3.  Continue browsing as the new tabs are loading, confirming or dismissing requests to set cookies as they come in.
4.  Stare in disbelief as a broken cookie dialogue hijacks the entire browser.
5.  Control-click on Firefox's icon in the dock to see an infinite number of "Confirm setting cookie" dialogues listed.
Actual Results:  
The browser becomes completely hijacked by this malformed cookie dialogue and its infinite number of spawn, to the point that the only way out is a force quit.

Expected Results:  
I should have received a regular, properly-formed cookie confirmation request which could be accepted or declined with a single click.

I am not using any themes.  I created a completely fresh profile within the past few months after my previous profile became corrupt.  This problem has arisen since then.

I will upload screenshots of the broken cookie confirmation, the infinite "confirm setting cookie" messages visible from the Dock, and an example of a news site showing the URL that I believe was attempting to load the cookie that kept resulting in this crash.

Comment 1

[S A]

Attachment: Picture of the broken cookie confirmation dialog box

Comment 2

[S A]

Attachment: What I see when I click on Firefox in the dock

Comment 3

[S A]

Attachment: A screencap showing the domain that was loading (on LA Times website) when the problem happened.

Comment 4

[David (Yavatar)]

S A - I have this issue too. This is a duplicate bug filed from a crash report I submitted a similar error (I didn't submit the bug, just the crash. It has to do with one of the ad sites. The problem I believe is basically that the ad server tries to set a cookie and is not waiting to see if there is a response to it wanting to set a cookie so it sends another one which doesn't get a response so it sends another one... but it never gives up.

There appears to be some kind of dialog box to cover ALL cookies from the site you are visiting but you can never get to it because it keeps getting covered by additional dialog boxes.

As soon as I can track that one down I'll mark this as duplicate if someone doesn't beat me to it. ;)

Comment 5

[David (Yavatar)]

Found even earlier report of this behavior: Duplicate Bug 430006

Comment 6

[S A]

Wow, this has been around since 2008?  I have just noticed it in the past 6 months.  I am guessing it is related to <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516224">Bug 516224</a> in which the "remember this decision" check box is apparently not honored (the other problem I've been having)?  

What a mess.

Comment 8

[John Smith]

It's ridiculous this bug has persisted for nearly a decade.  I actually STOPPED using Firefox two years ago because I got tired of this bug on my Mac.  I now use Chrome as my only web browser.  This is ridiculous.  It's a shame, because I really really really wanted to support Mozilla, but this bug rendered the browser totally unusable on my Mac.