Running a bookmarklet for Google Reader stops FF7.01

[G_Mugford]

Hi all,

For the last few weeks, I have been running into an issue with a long-used bookmarklet that runs the note feature for Google Reader. It's a javascript marklet on my toolbar for Firefox 7.01 (the issue seems to date back at least as far as FF6) running on a Windows 7 x64 Pro machine. I am using NoScript version 2.1.5, having got there through automatic updates. I believe I started with a pre-v1.0 of NoScript. It's been there and protecting me ever since.

The bookmarklet code is this:

Code: Select all

javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain='http://www.google.com';if(b&&!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement('script'));void(z.src='http://www.google.com/reader/ui/link-bookmarklet.js');void(b.appendChild(z));}else{}

What happens is that Firefox freezes hard. No reaction to anything save clicking on the X in the upper right hand corner. Even that doesn't actually succeed. I have to go into System Explorer and kill the Firefox process (which also kills plugin-container.exe [32]). THEN, I can re-start Firefox, which seems to load as if there had been a crash, offering to restore the tabs, and then doing so correctly. As a result, I have been copying any page I want to add to my Google Reader notes over to Chrome running on another monitor and then successfully adding the note via Chrome and the same bookmarklet.

The INTERESTING thing about the Firefox crash is that it doesn't come back perfectly. In fact, NoScript gets reset to running scripts globally. It was a while before I figured out why I'd occasionally glance down and see the S! symbol rather than the usual circles. Eventually I did figure out that the change, I'd NEVER run with global scripts enabled, was coming after one of these crash and recover processes.

Normally, I would just let this go and hope time and upgrades to both Firefox and NoScript would eventually fix the situation. But I had some time to kill and came to the forum today to browse. I saw, obliquely, references to issues with javascript from the url. Does the same set of issues apply to bookmarklets that act on the current URL? I also changed my dom.ipc.plugins.Java.enabled to true from the default false. I haven't tried the results out, yet. I tend to have 20-80 tabs open at any given point of time and have to dispense with those tabs before potentially crashing FF. Normally, I would notate them in Google Reader.

At any rate, if anything in this has tweaked your thought processes, I would appreciate any feedback. I will append my results here after doing a restart of Firefox with fewer tabs to put at risk if this isn't a fix.

Thanks for reading so far, GM

[G_Mugford]

I believe the change in the about:config has fixed the issue. I needed to note some pages from BigThink.com and was completely successful in doing so after I restarted. I note that there was a NoScript update on Monday Oct. 17 but that didn't fix the issue. The change I made in the last post is the only change to the FireFox ecosystem since then. So, setting dom.ipc.plugins.Java.enabled=true seems to have done the trick.

I hope this might help others who might have been struggling with the onset of problems similar to mine.

GM