Last modified: 2008-11-14 17:40:24 UTC
An increasing number of wikipedia pages are crashing not just my browser (Firefox 3.0.2 under linux) but also the desktop (KDE in my case). The problem is completely repeatable for a given page. I first noticed this on WP:ANI a few weeks ago (and reported it there, where another user confirmed they had the same problem but I guess the devs were not watching). The latest example was on [[user talk:The Fat Man Who Never Came Back]] Since most pages load normally I would guess the problem is associated with a graphics file. I don't have time to trace the problem file explicitly (especially as I lose my session every time I trigger the problem). It does seem to be specific to Firefox, maybe just that version. The page loads (not very well) with konqueror 3.3.1-6.el4.
This is not a bug in Firefox. If Firefox crashes for certain pages and takes KDE down with it, that's Firefox's fault, not ours. Report this to the Mozilla devs if someone else hasn't done that already.
Note that if it's taking down KDE, that's a KDE or X11 bug too! The page loads fine for me in Firefox 3.0.4 on Mac OS X 10.5 and Firefox 3.0.3 on Ubuntu 8.04. I do notice there's a largeish SVG image on the page. Paddy, are you by any chance using any user scripts or gadgets that might be affecting your page display?
E-mail from Roan: Are you sure Firefox is really choking on Wikipedia in particular? Yes Do the pages you mentioned *always* crash Firefox? Yes...that version ("completely repeatable" per original report) Did you close any other tabs you might have first (so you're sure the problem isn't happening in another tab)? Yes (rather...didn't have any other tabs open at the time). Do the pages in question happen to be big (seems to be, the Fat Man page is 361K of wikitext)? Guess so, at least this and ANI are big. If so, does Firefox choke on other big pages as well? Doesn't regularly fail on ANI for instance, just certain incarnations. (my original post is in archive 480 at ANI, but of course that is not a duplicate of the status of the page when I posted it originally). Did you check it's not an out-of-memory issue or some other issue unrelated to the web page? No I didn't. How would I go about doing that? (I don't have root access on the system in question but of course I can ask my system manager). Brion: No, I wasn't even logged in, but I don't use these even when I am.
We just updated to Firefox 3.0.4 and the problem persists. Slight difference: Page visibly renders the top screenful of text (correctly) before crashing, presumably triggered by something further down the page.
