780488 - Firefox locks up opening history

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Chris]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Build ID: 20120713134347

Steps to reproduce:

Open Firefox. When Firefox is loaded, click Ctrl+H for history.


Actual results:

History sidebar opens, shows blank history. Firefox becomes unresponsive, never recovers, must be forcefully closed.

Opening Firefox a second time, after it is forcefully closed, works fine - the history sidebar opens IMMEDIATELY, with no delay or locking up.


Expected results:

History should be displayed.

This bug has been around since v 13, I believe.

Windows XP SP3, fully up-to-date. Running FF with addons disabled, etc, makes no difference.

Comment 1

[Ioana (away)]

Chris, please try to reproduce this issue with a clean profile?
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

Comment 2

[Chris]

Why would I try to reproduce this with a new, empty profile?

A new profile would have no history. Clearly the bug is related to having a long history.

I suppose the question you're getting at is, "Is it really a bug that Firefox can't load a history over xx entries long?" I think it is.

Comment 3

[Ioana (away)]

(In reply to Chris from comment #2)
> Why would I try to reproduce this with a new, empty profile?
> 
> A new profile would have no history. Clearly the bug is related to having a
> long history.
> 
> I suppose the question you're getting at is, "Is it really a bug that
> Firefox can't load a history over xx entries long?" I think it is.

Chris, you can create a lot of history on a new profile and try to reproduce this bug. The idea is not having any extensions or themes. If it doesn't reproduce this way, it means one of your extensions (or more) are actually to blame and you need to take this to the extension's developers.

A shortcut for trying this would be going to about:support and clicking the "Reset Firefox". That will create you a new profile and add to it your existing history, bookmarks, passwords etc but not your extensions. Your initial profile will be saved on the desktop, in an "Old Firefox Data" folder so you can restore it afterwards.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Without more information there's nothing we can do here. There's been lots of performance improvements over the last few years as well, so this should be improved now. Though I wonder if the original reporter had some form of corruption that was upsetting things.