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This problem is intermittent but reproducible most of the time. Just goto any stock ticks, such as http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG. Refresh a few times and Firefox will crash. Been crashing Firefox since the past few Firefox 3.6 revisions. I reproduced the crash with Firefox 3.6.25.

Once I disable ABE, Firefox no longer crashes. Can anyone try this out for me to see if the crash is reproducible?

My ABE settings :
SYSTEM :
# Prevent Internet sites from requesting LAN resources.
Site LOCAL
Accept from LOCAL
Site .mycompany.com
Accept from .mycompany.com mycompany-internal.myonelogin.com humanasset.net
Deny

USER :
# User-defined rules. Feel free to experiment here.
Site .mycompany.com
Accept from .mycompany.com mycompany-internal.myonelogin.com humanasset.net
Deny

Note : I had the Firefox plugin-container.exe disabled according to the instructions at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 5#p9530495

Sorry, no, can't reproduce with your rules. -- at least, not in a reasonable period of time.
(No Google script or cookies were allowed. Does that make a difference for you?)

Are you behind a company firewall, as in the linked thread about plugin-container?
If so, does your admin grant permission to be visiting non-business-related sites, like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. on company time?

Regarding the rule, of course you used a placeholder name, mycompany. But is there a reason that it has to be in *both* SYSTEM and USER?
Not knowing your company's internal structure, of course there's no way I can know that.
But you could try eliminating the SYSTEM rule, leaving only the default, and use the USER rule as-is.

If this is sufficient permission for the company intranet resources, it *might* fix the issue.
Again, just trying to make an educated guess, not seeing behind the scenes.

If the company needs the SYSTEM local permission, then other possibilities would have to be explored.

Thank you very much Tom.

I allowed everything from Google, and only disallowed doubleclick.net.

This is my home computer, although I VPN back to my company at times. Crash happens even when I'm not on VPN.

> But is there a reason that it has to be in *both* SYSTEM and USER?
I was (and am still) not familiar how the ABE rules work. Did some research back then and worked my way out to get rid of the ABE warnings instead of disabling it. And yes, I renamed my company's domain to "mycompany".

> But you could try eliminating the SYSTEM rule, leaving only the default, and use the USER rule as-is.
Interestingly, I disabled the whole SYSTEM rule, and no crashes with only the USER rule in place. I then disable the USER rule and enabled SYSTEM rule, and it crashes occasionally. I'll try to remove the rules in SYSTEM and leave them at default and see how it goes.

I have a firewall running, although I did not configure it to be application-aware. So it's only doing what pre-historic firewalls does - filter up to the TCP/UDP Port level.

I believe I disabled the plugin-container.exe some time ago when I experienced some temporary browser freeze whenever I leave finance.yahoo.com. CPU goes up to 100% (on my Quad Core, only 1 CPU would reach 100%). Recently, I've narrowed down to NoScript (if I disable NoScript, I don't see this problem). I'm trying to narrow down to which component of NoScript, that's why I have not posted about that yet. Might not be ABE though. I have NoScript on my lappie and it's not showing any of these problems. So I'll have to compare the configuration a little.

So, are there any debugging I could enable to get some useful logs?

Ok, I'm fairly sure the crash is not due to ABE now. I can reproduce the crash even with ABE disabled.

I'll try to install NoScript with default configuration (probably enable only the Google domains) and see if I can reproduce the crash. Or if you have a minute or two to spare, this is how to crash it :

1. Open Firefox and goto http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG
2. Open a new tab on the same browser
3. Switch between the 2 tabs until it crashes nonstop. Refresh http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG if it's done loading.

Yeah anyone sane would not be doing that, but it seemed that it crashes on me when I switch to the tab that contains the Google Finance stock price.

I reproduced the crash after resetting NoScript to default. Need to toggle between the tabs as I mentioned in my previous post.

About how many times do you need to switch/refresh before crashing?

Does it happen with all other extensions disabled except for NoScript?

What plugins do you have?
Does it happen with all plugins disabled?

Does the page use Java? JavaScript?
What versions of each do you have?

I still can't reproduce, with or without Google and related scripts enabled.

therube's questions are all good. Try this, too, please:

Create a clean profile from scratch.
Install *only* NoScript, in its latest version. (May also try latest development build.)
Leave all the defaults for now.

Does the issue still persist?

If not, NoScript is not the culprit, and there is probably an extension conflict.
Standard Diagnostic will help you find out which one.

Thanks for exculpating ABE, and it doesn't sound as though firewalls are an issue here, especially since it's reproducible for you at home.

Thanks again Tom & therube.

So I've tried toggling some plugins. At the moment, I've narrowed down to Adobe Flash Player. After disabling it, so far, I could not reproduce the crash with NoScript.

The odd thing is, I tried NoScript on Firefox Portable (http://portableapps.com/ in case you guys have not heard of it), same 3.6.25 version, and it didn't crash when I toggle between the tabs.

I'll post again if I've something new.

Update 1 : I enabled the Flash plugin, and unchecked "Forbid Adobe Flash" under Noscript Options > Embeddings tab, and it did not crash either. The crash is rather sporadic, so I need more time to confirm this

Update 2 : Still crashes with "Forbid Adobe Flash" unchecked. Less occurrence though. So far so good after disabling Adobe Flash plugin.

beLIEve wrote:The odd thing is, I tried NoScript on Firefox Portable (http://portableapps.com/ in case you guys have not heard of it), same 3.6.25 version,

Very familiar with it, thanks.

I prefer Fx 3.6.x as my default browser, but need to have the latest stable release available for doing support here. With Firefox releasing new versions so frequently, it is much easier for me to put 5-6-7-8-9(-10-11 etc.) on a flash drive. PortableApps is my friend.

beLIEve wrote:and it didn't crash when I toggle between the tabs.

PortableApps versions are almost entirely self-contained, as you know, although they will use the natively-installed plug-ins such as Flash.
Perhaps something in your permanent (hard drive) installation of Firefox is corrupted?

There are many useful Firefox links, including Firefox Troubleshooting, here.
If Fx is the culprit, let's hope it can be fixed, rather than being reinstalled.

beLIEve wrote:Update 1 : I enabled the Flash plugin, and unchecked "Forbid Adobe Flash" under Noscript Options > Embeddings tab, and it did not crash either. The crash is rather sporadic, so I need more time to confirm this

Update 2 : Still crashes with "Forbid Adobe Flash" unchecked. Less occurrence though. So far so good after disabling Adobe Flash plugin.

Perhaps uninstall Flash plug-in, and do a clean reinstall of it from a fresh download?
Much easier than reinstalling Firefox.

Thanks again Tom. I managed to reproduce the crash consistently now. Looks like some race condition to me. Only happens when the Flash object is being loaded and when I toggle the tab at this time.

The good news is, I can reproduce the crash with NoScript disabled. The bad news is, I'm on my own now

Anyway, I still could not reproduce the crash on my VM, same version of Firefox and Flash. Gotta be some configuration on my Firefox. I've already cleared the Flash data (Control Panel > Flash Player > Advanced tab).

I appreciate both your feedback. Take care guys

> The bad news is, I'm on my own now

No you're not. Now you've got the full weight of Mozilla behind you, Bugzilla.

beLIEve wrote:The good news is, I can reproduce the crash with NoScript disabled. The bad news is, I'm on my own now

I appreciate both your feedback. Take care guys

What therube said.

And on behalf of both of us, thank you for the kind words. Our pleasure.

Hello again guys.

just for records, the following entry causes Firefox to crash. Long long ago, I changed this to false. I replicated this entry into my prefs.js to my Firefox VM and Firefox portable and they start crashing when I switch tabs when Flash is loading.
user_pref("dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll", false);

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=720667.

Not reproducible with Firefox 9. Seems like it doesn't use this key.

beLIEve wrote:Hello again guys.

just for records, the following entry causes Firefox to crash. Long long ago, I changed this to false. I replicated this entry into my prefs.js to my Firefox VM and Firefox portable and they start crashing when I switch tabs when Flash is loading.
user_pref("dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll", false);

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=720667.

Not reproducible with Firefox 9. Seems like it doesn't use this key.

Aren't you glad therube pointed you to Bugzilla?

Not sure how much time we want to spend on an issue in which you're happy and we're happy, but for academics' sake, I *still* can't reproduce this on Fx 3.6.25.

It seems I already have about:config dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll =false. But your test case still wouldn't crash the browser.
I tried it with another stock, then a third one. On the third one, it took longer than usual to load, and I kept toggling tabs, but the stock chart still showed after some seconds. No browser crash.

*IF* you're curious enough to pursue further (No F3 user has complained of this issue before AFAIK), does it depend cookie permissions to reproduce? By default, I have all Google script and cookies blocked, but TA'd google and gstatic in both NS and RequestPolicy. Can't reproduce, though it does seem to slow the loading, as above.

But if you want to let it go, fine by me. And thanks for the interesting thread @ BZ.

> Aren't you glad therube pointed you to Bugzilla?
Yeh, I get an answer to why no bugs were opened despite having submitting like 10 crashes to them

>Not sure how much time we want to spend on an issue in which you're happy and we're happy, but for academics' sake, I *still* can't reproduce this on Fx 3.6.25.
If you feel adventurous, we can keep trying.

> *IF* you're curious enough to pursue further (No F3 user has complained of this issue before AFAIK), does it depend cookie permissions to reproduce?
Cookie permissions are not relevant. It can be reproduced even without NoScript and having other plugins disabled.

Good that you've noticed that it's slower when that SWF plugin set to False. That's the first step to reproduce the crash. Try toggling the tabs after the page is loaded and before the chart is loaded.

If you monitor the title of the tab, you should see the following sequence when your refresh it :
1. Loading...
2. The name of your stock displays
3. Loading... again. This is when the Flash object gets loaded <<<<< This is slower when that SWF setting is False.
4. The name of your stock displays again. This is when the page load is complete.

Toggle the tabs between 3 and 4 and you should get a crash.

> But if you want to let it go, fine by me. And thanks for the interesting thread @ BZ.
You're most welcome. I don't know how busy are you guys, but I do have some time to spare every now and then. Have fun