770168 - Firefox shows a blank page when loading multiple PDFs in a terminal server environment

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect, P3)

Description

[David McMahon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1
Build ID: 20120614114901

Steps to reproduce:

When loading multiple PDFs in a browser, one after the other, in Firefox 3.6 we see a sporadic issue where sometimes the Adobe Reader plugin does not get loaded, and Firefox just displays a blank page (white/grey/black).  The browser status bar shows "Done" and nothing else is loaded even if the browser window is left for a long time.

The employees work with PDFs in Firefox all day long, and cannot use standalone Adobe Reader.  The issue occur sporadically during the day and does not follow any pattern.

After research from Adobe engineering it was found that in some instances Firefox sends an NPP_DestroyStream event with a reason of 1.  This will cause the Adobe Reader plugin to exit, which results in the issue.  If the Adobe Reader plugin is modified to ignore this event, then everything seems to work.

After testing with Mozilla Firefox 10, the problem was not reproducible, so we assume that the issue has somehow been fixed by changes in Firefox.

Can someone confirm if this is a known issue that was fixed with later versions of Firefox (3.6+)?


Actual results:

Blank browser window, Adobe Reader plugin is closed


Expected results:

Reader plugin to display PDF in the browser window

Comment 1

[David McMahon]

This issue can only be seen in the production environment.  To reproduce the issue in test environments we have setup a terminal server with 5 different user sessions.  We also used XAMPP webserver, and an automated script to open/close approx. 80 PDF documents of different sizes/content one after the other (with a 2.5 minute interval) in Firefox.  We ran this script in all 5 user sessions in parallel.  This emulates the kind of interaction/load the employees create on the production servers.

Here are the results before and after the Adobe Reader hotfix mentioned above while using Firefox 3.6.x.
Problem occurs in:
(Test1) 3 from 5 RDP Sessions
(Test2) 2 from 5 RDP Sessions
(Test3) 3 from 5 RDP Sessions
(Test4) 1 from 5 RDP Sessions
(Test5) 2 from 5 RDP Sessions

After Adobe Reader hotfix, problem occurs in:
(Test1) 0 from 5 RDP Sessions
(Test2) 0 from 5 RDP Sessions
(Test3) 0 from 5 RDP Sessions
(Test4) 0 from 5 RDP Sessions
(Test5) 0 from 5 RDP Sessions

The problem does not occur when using Firefox 10.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Firefox3.6 is no longer supported and reached EOL.
I'm sorry but I have to mark your report wontfix.
Please reopen if this is an issue in a supported Browser (Firefox10ESR or Firefox13)