Want To Crash Firefox 3? Here’s how.
Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Internet | Posted on 24-06-2008
UPDATE: Having some friends test these sites on their Mac with OSX, FF3 doesn’t crash on a Mac. Good to know.
UPDATE: The problem has been officially fixed! Installing Siliverlight Beta 2 did the trick. Thanks to Jon Galloway.
I have been enjoying Firefox 3 since it was released until I noticed visiting certain web sites would crash Firefox. I thought it was just me but then started going back to the same links and Firefox would crash again. And when I mean crash, I mean shut the entire application down. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.00.
There are two sites I have found that will crash Firefox 3 every time.
1. MSDN Library
Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com and at the top of the page click on the Library as show here. When you do. Good bye Firefox 3!
2. Go Daddy
The second site is visit http://www.godaddy.com and click the “My Account” link as shown here. When you do, good bye Firefox 3.
These are the two I’ve found so far. I seriously don’t understand what they are doing to cause this. It works in IE! (haha) I’m sure it has to do with JavaScript.
Anyway, if you are using FF3, stay away from these two sites until either FF3 fixes what they are doing or these webmasters figure it out and fix it. If you find other sites crashing, add it to the comments below and I’ll keep updating the screen shots. This could turn into a fun exercise to see how many sites are actually broken. By the way, the OS I’m running to get these results is Vista with SP1. If someone has a Mac handy, I would like to know if this happens to you as well on these sites.
and I was really looking forward to the crash, too
and fictionpress didnt crash it
but i have had it crash a few times… just dont know what sites they were
My FF3 crahses when I am browsing to a silverlight page or if I try to open an pdf file in the browser. When the plugins (silverlight and adobe pdf) are diabled, everthing is fine, except that I cannot use these two services anymore. It might be a problem with firefox plugin
Yep. I have a new XP machine with the latests FF3 installed, and the best I could do after logging in and dealing with the Firefox default security page was a web page that lacked images and had serious CSS issues. Needless to say, I cannot access any of the GoDaddy accounts using Firefox 3 on this machine. It seems to work well, though, on my older XP / FF3 machine.
I experience about 2 or 3 crashes a day with Firefox 3 ( out of perhaps 50 – 75 sites visited). This occurs mainly under linux but also on WinXP. The two sites mentioned here, ironically work fine. Elsewhere I came across the suggestion that it was a java problem.
Fictionpress. Fictionpress kills firefox 3.
I encountered the GoDaddy problem but found the best solution: uninstall silverlight! If a program is going to crash my browser and not even tell me what’s going on or how to fix it, it doesn’t deserve to be on my machine.
@Christopher
If you read Galloway’s blog post on it he comments on the problem, and it is is a Firefox 3 problem so it seems.
Crashes on a MacBook pro & FF3 – everytime! I was able to log in once but as soon as I clicked a link on the top navigation it crashed. Now it crashes everytime I click to login.
Works fine in Safari…
Sooo….contrary to how the posting started out, it sounds like this is actually a Microsoft problem rather than a Mozilla/Firefox problem?
Yeah, what Jon said. But in order to do the install, you need to use IE to get to the download page for Silverlight, it will crash Firefox. Once you run the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 installer, all will be well again.
I was going to say that I wasn’t having any issues on Vista SP1 either, but that’s because I don’t have Silverlight installed at home yet. ^^^
Both of those crashes are caused by running Silverlight 2 Beta 1. You need to upgrade to Silverlight 2 Beta 2.
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2008/06/08/silverlight-2-beta-2-and-firefox-3-so-happy-together.aspx
Works fine on XP with Fx3.
I’ve experienced this on those exact two sites, but nowhere else. I wonder if it’s the same reason for both sites…