[Discuss] fiefox and HD thrashing

[Murray Strome]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan W. Irwin" <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>
Date: Friday, December 28, 2007 8:47 pm
Subject: Re: [Discuss] fiefox and HD thrashing
To: discuss at vlug.org

> 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 
> strangethings 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 
> immediatelykill (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

I have used Firefox (various versions from 1.0 or earlier up to the current one, 2.0.0.11) with many versions of Mandriva (including 2006), and more recently with Kubuntu and don't recall ever seeing this problem.  I have seen Firefox itself "hang", in which case I had to kill it from a terminal, but it never affected the other applications. I have also seen it suddenly simply die.  I did try version 3 Beta, but had some problems with it (mostly related to Java) -- cannot remember the details now.

Murray