[Discuss] fiefox and HD thrashing

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-12-27 20:28-0800 pw wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Recently firefox has been causing my hard disk to start thrashing
> away. I can't figure out what may have changed.
>
> Has anyone had any similar problems with firefox?

Certain grossly non-standard sites will make browsers do really strange
things that are strongly dependent on browser version (as the codebase gets
more and more fireproof against bad sites).

Barbara looks at a huge number of sites as part of her LoLL effort and some
of them would lock up konqueror (max cpu with no way to get out of it except
to kill the job) but never firefox for her previous ubuntu dapper platform.
I never had such trouble with konqueror on Debian oldstable. Now we have
both upgraded to Debian testing, neither of us has lockup troubles with
either konqueror or iceweasel (Debian's version of firefox).  However, on
the new distro there are some sites Barbara has discovered that immediately
kill (probably a segfault) iceweasel, but konqueror handles them without
troubles.

For any site giving you trouble, you can get a good laugh by trying it
with the w3c validator at http://validator.w3.org/.  Sometimes you get
more than a hundred errors for even short documents which is certainly a
talking point when communicating with the webmasters of such rogue sites.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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