My Box Has Been Foxxed - Gecko, We Have A Problem

Man, I should have been paying attention...if I wasn't a geek in training, I would be sap paying technical support.

Thanks Firefox.

An update to .13 hosed my box. Unfortunately, it goes deeper than Firefox...it's Gecko as a whole and I will illustrate in a moment.

If you don't believe your browser is the centerpiece of your distro experience, go ahead and switch to Konqueror or Opera for a while. All those cool extensions and tools you've come to count on daily? Talk about environment-shock.

I recently wrote an article lamenting the fact that Firefox/Mozilla just isn't getting it done. Thousands upon thousands of people are fighting mysterious crashes caused by "floating point exceptions", and it seems to be getting worse every day. The trouble is, changing from Firefox to Flock or Iceweasel is like jumping from the Titanic to the USS Maine.

You are still going to be on a sinking ship...and the Gecko engine seems to be the torpedo.

I had re-installed my distro because Firefox got to the point where it was crashing on every fifth page I opened. I jumped through the hoops placed in front of me via the google searches for this particular problem. Even purging every mention or shadow of Firefox and all of it's obscure files rendered me the exact same problems upon re-install. I have been using Opera in the interim. Yes it is proprietary, I realize that, but it's stable...and stable is good.

Stable is what Linux is supposed to be all about, right?

With a new install completed, I cautiously allowed Firefox to be my default browser. With the caution of a trucker hauling frost-laden dynamite, I began installing each of my mission-critical extensions one by one, and there are maybe 6 of them total. It's not like I have dozens of them installed. I made sure via X restarts and entire reboots that each extension I installed passed the "two hour test". I hammer the browser for a full two hours, always loaded via terminal so I can watch the output for any approaching problems.

Tedious...? yeah, but at the end of two days, I had a fully functioning, non-crashing Firefox browser and my on-line world was again productive.

Then I committed digital suicide.

I hit the update button that was blinking in my task bar and walked away to get some coffee and make some business phone calls.

When I got back and rolled over the install log, it was like I was standing in the middle of the train tracks in a bad dream. I was watching the train approach with a demonic Engineer hunched over the throttle, bearing down on me with every intent of making me part of the tracks...and you know how those dreams go.

Your feet are welded in place...you cannot run, you cannot get out of the way.

I saw that my Firefox application had been updated to .13. .12 had been working flawlessly

Crap.

And so it goes, and this is how it does go for me now. My coveted zareason.com website? Crashes every time due to a floating point exception. Every friggin' time. As does Fox News, Linux.com, and about thirty other important websites I use daily. My google search bar? I cannot see the text in the box as I type. The font is the same color as the white background and changing the background or font will not fix it...One always matches the other...always. Same with my url bar. I didn't touch any settings that would have caused this behavior...it simply manifested itself upon the dreaded and much-cursed update.

Fortunately, I am a touch typist and I don't rely upon visual input to validate my keystrokes. I can change themes, styles...my brand of soda...my socks; nothing allows me to see what I am typing. To make matters worse, ANY download link I click immediately crashes the browser. Again, all of this after one simple update. No other changes were made. I just opened my browser after the "event" and this is what I get for my trouble. I will ask the question again.

Why?

Millions of people have come to depend on this tool for their daily work, and to be honest with you...I was one of the thousands of advocates who got people in Windows to at least switch their browsers if they couldn't switch to Linux. Unfortunately, many of those people are abandoning Firefox, and I get their emails every week. Sometimes only one or two a week, often over a dozen. People are going back to Internet Explorer...and the old adage is pounded against me time and time again.

"You get what you pay for."

And of course, like a good advocate, I ran immediately with my logs and screenshots to file the bug report, only to find that hundreds had been there in front of me. No, I did not add to the cacophony of voices...what's the point?

If a couple thousand complaints about this exact same problem is being ignored by Mozilla, what's the point in adding one more.

Sigh. OK...let's see if Opera is in my current repository.

Get it fixed guys...the people who have faithfully stood behind you are getting covered with something that smells suspiciously like crap.

I've published my terminal output for each browser when it went terminal on me. Every crash was the result of typing the zareason.com url into the offending browser. Note: Opera, Midori and Konqueror did not crash on these events. I don't have iceweasel in my repository and because this is a mission-critical machine, I will not go outside my repos or compile anything foreign. Take a look and see what you think. I've ghosted this install on two other machines and have reproduced the identical problems on all machines.

All-Righty Then


A gratifying sight. 7 hours after this blog published, an official bug report was not only filed but opened. Now THAT's community.

http://www.nabble.com/-Bug-39621--NEW:-Firefox-crashes-on-a-specific-page-td16392705.html
epiphany

[helios@helios ~]$ epiphany
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
** Message: GetValue variable 1 (1)
** Message: GetValue variable 2 (2)
Floating point exception
[helios@helios ~]$

firefox

[helios@helios ~]$ firefox
/usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.13/run-mozilla.sh: line 131: 4242 Floating point exception/usr/bin/soundwrapper "$prog" ${1+"$@"}
[helios@helios ~]$

AND the error I get anytime I click ANY download link. That in itself is incompetence on a grand level. I have reproduced this problem on 3 machines with identical installs, so there is no "machine specific" issues in play here...at least not with any probability.

Firefox after hitting any download link

[helios@helios ~]$ firefox
Flash Player: Warning: environment variable G_FILENAME_ENCODING is set and is not UTF-8
Flash Player: Warning: environment variable G_FILENAME_ENCODING is set and is not UTF-8

(gecko:11824): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_parent_window: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

(gecko:11824): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_window_is_viewable: assertion `window != NULL' failed

(gecko:11824): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_parent: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
/usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.13/run-mozilla.sh: line 131: 11824 Segmentation fault /usr/bin/soundwrapper "$prog" ${1+"$@"}
[helios@helios ~]$

seamonkey

[helios@helios ~]$ seamonkey
Floating point exception
[helios@helios ~]$

Galeon

[helios@helios ~]$ galeon
Floating point exception
[helios@helios ~]$ galeon
Floating point exception

kazehakase

[helios@helios ~]$ kazehakase

(this message was repeated 77 times in konsole, I've deleted all but 3)
(kazehakase:15588): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_pointer: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

(kazehakase:15588): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_pointer: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

(kazehakase:15588): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_pointer: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

(kazehakase:15588): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_pointer: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
Floating point exception
[