844185 - Clicking links on twitter will make the page load forever and ultimately freeze Firefox on shutdown

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 839414

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Johannes]

This happens since Firefox 18, I think, on Win7 x64, and as far as I can tell only while I'm logged into Twitter. While I'm on any page, clicking on a link that will lead to another page on Twitter (e.g. someone's profile, but not ajax overlay pages like profile summaries), all I get is a throbber icon. This throbber icon will stay there forever and the page I wanted to visit won't show. Even opening Twitter in a new tab will show me a blank page ("Connecting...") forever. Middle-clicking a link won't do this, supposedly because some JavaScript code is not executed in that case.
I can still load other pages in such a tab and close it, but Twitter remains "locked". Even worse, when I want to shut down Firefox in such a situation, it will stay active as an unresponsive task (no window) that I have to kill through task manager. If I don't do that and just shut down the system, the Twitter tab will re-appear when opening Firefox after a restart, although I clearly closed it before closing the browser. Killing it via task manager won't re-open the tab.

I know this is very vague, and I have only seen one other person on Twitter complaining about this so far. If it's of any help, on this particular profile Twitter won't embed scripts from their Amazon cloud, but on other profiles (and when visiting in private mode), it does - so maybe I get some different JavaScript that somehow confuses Firefox. Let me know if there are any resources I can provide to help with debugging.

Comment 1

[Johannes]

To clarify, I mean Twitter's throbber icon, not the one on the Firefox tab.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Does it also happen with a new profile ?
http://support.mozilla.org/kb/Managing%20profiles

Comment 3

[Johannes]

Turns out that the HTML Validator 0.9.5.2 extension prevents the sites from loading.