658757 - Firefox hang with old nVidia drivers on Kubuntu (Yahoo mail, westernunion)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Dan Soper]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

Frequently, but not always, the new Ajax-based Yahoo Mail interface will cause the browser to hang. (The "Reproducibility" fields below doesn't seem to have a "nearly always" option, but "sometimes" understates the situation.)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log in to Yahoo Mail Beta
2. View the contents of the "Spam" folder
3. Click the little trash-can icon to empty the spam folder
4. Wait for action to complete (often it doesn't)
5. After giving up waiting, right-click the browser's Back button to return to the Home page.

Actual Results:  
Several results:

steps 3: The number of unread emails in the folder in shown in the folder list, immediately to the left of the trash-can icon. This number disappears, as expected.

step 4: usually the list of emails stays as it was.

step 5: the browser ceases to respond to mouse or keyboard input. After several clicks of the Close button on the title-bar, it crashes out.

Expected Results:  
Folder is emptied and the list of emails in it is cleared.

Browser does not hang or crash.

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Does a fresh profile help?
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles

Comment 2

[Thomas Ahlblom]

Do you get any entries in about:crashes after crashing out in step 5?

If so, please post the related Crash IDs here.

Comment 3

[George Carstoiu]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0a1) Gecko/20110531 Firefox/7.0a1

I was unable to reproduce issue using the steps in Comment 0.

Reporter, do you have any new information on this bug?

Comment 4

[Dan Soper]

Using a new profile I have not yet reproduced the bug. But I don't get much spam so I've only made a handful of attempts so far.

Comment 5

[George Carstoiu]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0a1) Gecko/20110607 Firefox/7.0a1


I was eventually able to reproduce a crash within Yahoo Mail Beta, using the following steps:
1. Enter Yahoo Mail
2. Go to a folder that has emails that you can delete
3. Switch view to In Scrolling List(With Preview)
4. Start deleting emails using the delete key

Firefox will crash after deleting several mails:

Crash reports:
bp-8ddc1a95-e40c-4c8f-9210-fa6b22110607 06/08/2011 09:09 AM
bp-bce9bdf5-71a0-4ba1-b7a3-53b4e2110607 06/08/2011 09:07 AM

I was also able to reproduce this in Firefox 4.0.1 - works fine on Internet Explorer 8.

Setting resolution to NEW and changing summary to: Yahoo Mail Beta causes Firefox to crash

Comment 6

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

Rescinding tracking flags for Fx5 as I jumped the gun before getting confirmation that this happens in Fx5 beta.

Comment 7

[George Carstoiu]

I was able to reproduce issue on Firefox 5.0b4 

Crash report:
bp-c33edcca-975a-48aa-8066-03d622110607 06/08/2011 09:50 AM

Comment 8

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

This looks to be a dupe of bug 655660

Comment 9

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Removed tracking noms since this a dupe so they won't appear in the query.

Comment 10

[David Mandelin [:dmandelin]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0a1) Gecko/20110607 Firefox/7.0a1
> 
> 
> I was eventually able to reproduce a crash within Yahoo Mail Beta, using the
> following steps:
> 1. Enter Yahoo Mail
> 2. Go to a folder that has emails that you can delete
> 3. Switch view to In Scrolling List(With Preview)
> 4. Start deleting emails using the delete key
> 
> Firefox will crash after deleting several mails:
> 
> Crash reports:
> bp-8ddc1a95-e40c-4c8f-9210-fa6b22110607 06/08/2011 09:09 AM
> bp-bce9bdf5-71a0-4ba1-b7a3-53b4e2110607 06/08/2011 09:07 AM
> 
> I was also able to reproduce this in Firefox 4.0.1 - works fine on Internet
> Explorer 8.
> 
> Setting resolution to NEW and changing summary to: Yahoo Mail Beta causes
> Firefox to crash

George, I can't reproduce using those steps. Is there any chance you would be willing to provide us with a core dump?

Comment 11

[Dan Soper]

This is not a duplicate of bug 655660. Or rather, if comment #5 is a dupe of 655660, then this bug, 658757, is not. Because comment #5 is plainly a different way that YM causes the browser to crash from the one I reported. (I can't see bug 658757.)

This bug is specific to Linux and, I have recently discovered, specific to installations that do not use nVidia's proprietary graphics drivers. I'm using Kubuntu 10.10, and in the last couple of days I've installed the "NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 173)", which caused the YM problem to go away.

A similar issue that is also fixed by installing the nVidia driver is with this site: http://www.westerntelegraph.co.uk/news/ where each page would cause the browser to freeze for several seconds with the page partly loaded.


It is now my view that the issue here is with Kubuntu's default graphics driver making the system run slowly such that some applications, notably Firefox, can become unresponsive. The implication is that operations that are graphics-intensive would be the worst offenders. What I observed with YM is that it appears to be Ajax stuff that leads to the hang.

I do not know why a clean profile never resulted in a hang, but my suspicion lies with Privoxy rather than any browser add-ons. Privoxy re-writes the HMTL code to remove banner ads, and I have some rules specifically for Yahoo. My clean Firefox profile was never configured to use Privoxy. So possibly Privoxy does something weird with Ajax requests, though I don't see how it could: it's not as if the HTTP request or reply are different from a "normal" web page.


So anyway: this bug is NOT a dupe of 655660 but more probably a result of a system that is slowed down under certain circumstances by an inadequate graphics driver. I think there is still an issue here, so I'm changing the status to "Reopened" and reverting the Platform to Linux.

Comment 12

[u279076]

Considering this is a problem which can be tied to poor graphics drivers and resolved by using the officially supported driver, this is potentially INVALID or WONTFIX.

I'll defer to developers to makr that call.

Comment 13

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Should this bug lead to a blocklisting of those old drivers? If so it probably has value, otherwise resolve it.

Comment 14

[Till Schneidereit [:till]]

Given comment 13 and the fact that the crash signature can't happen anymore, now that JM is removed, I'll mark this as INVALID.