866075 - SIGSEGV: spurious scientific notation strings on-screen precede browser crash

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 864412

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[M ODonnell]

Attachment: wordsWfriendsExample1.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:23.0) Gecko/20130426 Firefox/23.0
Build ID: 20130426030834

Steps to reproduce:

Allowed Nightly to update itself.


Actual results:

Some pages now littered with spurious scientific notation-style strings on-screen.  My sense is that Javascript is involved.  These strings will actually displace screen elements, ie, they will cause menu entries or game tiles to be positioned away from their customary locations.  Further, Firefox seems to just die at random now, even when more or less quiescent.


Expected results:

Um, they shouldn't be there

Comment 1

[M ODonnell]

Attachment: spuriousStringDisplacingGhosteryMenuEntry.jpg

Comment 2

[M ODonnell]

The spurious string in the attached WordsWithFriends example JPEG is partially obscured behind another image but FYI, it's "312.6422752069773016e-308".  On other occasions (no capture available) those strings have been present by the dozens, scattered all over the display.

The spurious string in the attached Ghostery example JPEG is clearly visible as "1.0600876971031291e+189"

Comment 3

[M ODonnell]

Attachment: wordsWfriendsDialogExample.jpg

Shows another example of the spurious scientific notation numbers, this time in a dialog box over top of the main wordsWithFriends board, with a second example visible in top right corner.

Comment 4

[M ODonnell]

Attachment: Example screen showing images displaced by scientific notation strings

The two wordsWithFriendsCompare*jpg images show how the spurious numeral strings displaced images on the screen, which is almost always followed by a full browser crash.

Comment 5

[M ODonnell]

Attachment: wordsWithFriendsCompareOK.jpg

wordsWithFriendsCompareOK.jpg  Example screen showing normal images NOT displaced by scientific notation strings.

Comment 6

[mjh563]

Maybe a duplicate of bug 866013 or bug 864412?

Comment 7

[M ODonnell]

Yes, it's possible that this is a duplicate of one of those bugs, though I hope this won't be closed as a Dup until that's clearer.

Unexpected scientific notation string also present in Ghostery->Settings->Options->BlockingOptions->Trackers listing.

Comment 8

[M ODonnell]

It now appears that I can fairly reliably reproduce this SIGSEGV and would like to provide a useable crashdump or GDB trace or something.  How shall I proceed?  I trapped the SIGSEGV by attaching to the Firefox process with GDB before it faulted, but without symbols could not make much sense of what I found.

Comment 9

[Scoobidiver (away)]

(In reply to M ODonnell from comment #8)
> How shall I proceed?
See https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/How_to_get_a_stacktrace_for_a_bug_report

Comment 10

[M ODonnell]

Maybe solved?  I allowed Nightly to update itself to 23.0a1 (2013-04-28) and now am completely unable to reproduce the SIGSEGV and all signs of the spurious numbers on-screen are gone.  I will wait a few more days/updates and if it stays gone we can declare victory.

Comment 11

[M ODonnell]

Successive updates [now up to 23.0a1 (2013-05-02)] now all seem to work as expected so I will (try to) mark this RESOLVED.  Do we know what the problem was?