Mozilla Says Firefox 1.5 Bug Not Serious

TechWeb News ^ | December 12, 2005 | Greg Keizer

[Eagle9]

Mozilla.org

Long-title temporary startup unresponsiveness

Web pages with extremely long titles (the posted proof of concept used 2.5 million characters) can cause Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite to appear to "hang" on startup when reading the browsing history data. The browser will eventually continue normally although this can take up to several minutes on a slower computer. The unresponsive starts will continue until the item with the long title is removed from the history file or eventually expires.

We have investigated this issue and can find no basis for claims that variants of this denial-of-service attack can cause an exploitable crash, and no evidence for this claim has been offered. There does not appear to be any risk to users or their computers beyond the temporary unresponsiveness at startup.

Should the user encounter this problem the slow starts can be fixed by deleting the item from history.

Deleting the item from history

1. Open History from the Go menu
2. Select the item with the long title
3. Press the delete button

Clearing all history data

• In Firefox 1.5
  1. Select "Clear Private Data" from the Tools menu
  2. Check the "Browsing History" box and press the "Clear Private Data Now" button
• In Firefox 1.0 (also works in 1.5)
  1. Select "Options" from the "Tools" menu
  2. On the "Privacy" tab select "History"
  3. Press the Clear button in the History section

[D-fendr]

My policy is not to open websites with names longer than one million characters.

[George from New England]

Is it the name or title, OR IS IT the url address that is of this length?

[Eagle9]

Yeah, mine too.

[PissAndVinegar]

Does it matter?

What was the last URL you went to with over 2 million characters?

How about the last time you've been on pages with titles over 2 million characters either?

[Eagle9]

Is it the name or title, OR IS IT the url address that is of this length?

I'm not a technical expert but I think it would be the title of the address sent out by a bot, trojan horse from a hacker.

[Revolting cat!]

It's certainly not like the series of series bugs in that other product from Redmond in a blue state!

[Eagle9]

It's certainly not like the series of series bugs in that other product from Redmond in a blue state!

Nor is it as hugh.

[sam_paine]

Sounds like it has problems with hugh URLs.

[BallyBill]

I started having problems with Firefox last week on ALL my PC's. If I open another site using tabs the system comes to a near halt.

I've been trying out Opera since and it ain't bad, but I'd still like to use FireFox.

I will try this fix and see what happens.
Be Back later.

[BallyBill]

Well that seemed to work great. Later, I'll try my laptop and see what happens before I clear it. On this one I just cleared it as soon as I opened it up.

[Eagle9]

Well that seemed to work great.

If it works as well on your other computers using Firefox, you'll know that this was the problem. That would be good news and a simple solution to the problem.

[ShadowAce]

[M0sby]

Hi there..
Thanks for the post..
I am NOT a techno person here..so forgive my "less-than-educated" question...
But...has anyone else noticed Firefox slowing WAY DOWN..or not loading recently?
And..IS THIS what this article is talking about?

Sorry if this is a STUPID question..
I try not to be stupid very often!

[Hank Rearden]

Any experts out there have an explanation for this one?

When I use Control-B to bring up the Bookmarks sidebar, it takes maybe 2-3 seconds to appear.

Yet, if I click on the "Bookmarks" Menu title at the top of the Firefox window, it freezes Firefox for about 20 seconds while it works to open the drop-down window.

What's the deal there? I do have a lot of Bookmarks saved over the years; I'm just thinking the two routines load the file differently.

[chronic_loser]

It is not stupid..., it is just hard to answer given how little data we have. This article is talking about extremely long "internet addresses" and should not be a problem for you if you don't have some ridiculously long address of a website for a home page (not likely).

Is it only Firefox, or are you having troubles with all your programs? Have you defragged your drive lately? Run any "fixit" type of utilities (ie, Norton) to fix your links and all? Is your ram sufficient and do you ever get messages that you need to increase your pagefiles?

All those are things that can slow a Windoze box down.

[Marie Antoinette]

Firefox bug ping.

This is exactly why I let my husband be the guinea pig with new releases. LOL!

[tubebender]

I have a similar experience in Fire Fox 1.0.6 but it still beats IE and I always have Safari to fall back on...

[JerseyHighlander]

Im experiencing really random bugs in ff 1.5
The address bar dropdown won't work, disappears, or locks in the down position, the quicktime plug in won't install, there are random resets to default configurations(this is from 2 extensions fighting over some resource or something).

Overall, it's a great improvement, but some serious UI flaws still exist.

[Big Giant Head]

I have both Firefox and Opera.I got Firefox 1.5 on the evening of it's release and it's really fast. It won't let me do some things, like http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.html . It simply won't run. It's probably user error, or a setting in my firewall maybe. The site runs in Opera, however, but Opera won't let me log into my Hotmail account.

The 1.01 version of Firefox on my laptop still works great, but is a little bit slower.

I'm still messing around with both, trying to make them both work everywhere.