CNN Popups are Legion
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I rarely pay attention to the "pop-up blocked" notice bar in Firefox while I browse CNN... it has become ubiquitous on their sites, and I tend not to mind as it doesn't really get in the way of my browsing. Sometimes, like this morning, I'll even click on the red 'X' to make it go away, if I decide I need the extra half-centimeter of reading space.
But then it came back.
Amused, I clicked the red 'X' again, after which it promptly re-returned
"Firefox prevented this site from opening 3 pop-up windows"
I sat there for just a moment, and watched the counter increment to 4 and 5 as I started reading the article. At the point of this posting... well, see for yourself:
[IMG]http://i842.photobucket.com/albums/zz343/mdz3Photobucket/CNN_popups.png[/IMG]
I still have the tab open in my browser. I'll leave it that way the rest of the day to see how high the counter gets before something breaks or (more likely) Firefox swallows up all the RAM this laptop has available.
I'll keep you guys updated.
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OMG Zerg rush!
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If you've ever worked with InsightExpress, you'd know that they are, indeed, The Real WTF. Worst Javascript I've ever seen, broken implementations, terrible customer service, etc. I'm constantly amazed that they're still in business.
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@blakeyrat said:
If you've ever worked with InsightExpress, you'd know that they are, indeed, The Real WTF. Worst Javascript I've ever seen, broken implementations, terrible customer service, etc. I'm constantly amazed that they're still in business.
I'd post a snapshot/code of one of the popup ads, but I'm worried that allowing one to actually load would stop the torrent of them trying to reach my computer. I can't seem to get Firefox to give me the full URL, either, otherwise I'd post that. I might just go ahead and load one once the count reaches 2^12 or something... Unless anyone has any better ideas?
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1337 (really!) pop-ups so far, and I leave for lunch. Firefox is holding steady at 175 MB, and pop-ups appear at a constant rate of 1 every 8 seconds (i.e. over 6 days to hit 2^16, so I'm not even going to bother).
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2222 Pop-ups and I called it off to look at the source of the page and advertisment.
I couldn't find the source of the repeated loadings in the CNN Money page (though I did discover a bit of code that checks if you were referred from Yahoo.com, and if you were, it doesn't bother sending pop-up/pop-under ads). It looks to be due to some cnnad_createAd function defined elsewhere.
The advertisment itself had some weird behaviors, as well. It cointained some 500 lines of code lumped into a horrible one-liner. After I loaded it, it continued to refresh itself every 8 seconds. It also contained some code that repeatedly tries to write random cookies to my computer, then read them back and report its success/failure to a log file somewhere, then does the same with all sorts of browser settings.
At least... I think so. Can anyone else see what it is doing?
Cookie testing code:
[code]
InsightExpress.Cookies.Enabled=function(){var testValue=Math.floor(1000*Math.random());
InsightExpress.Cookies.SetCookie('AICookieTest',testValue);
var b=(testValue==InsightExpress.Cookies.ReadCookie('AICookieTest'));
InsightExpress.Log('Cookies Enabled',b);
return b;[/code]
Settings testing code:
[code]
if(invite&&invite.Settings.Disallow&&invite.Settings.Disallow.Variables){InsightExpress.ForEach(invite.Settings.Disallow.Variables,function(){if(window[this]){InsightExpress.Log('Variable blocked: '+this); allow=false;
[/code]
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@North Bus said:
(i.e. over 6 days to hit 2^16, so I'm not even going to bother)
And lo, on the 7th day His Firefox did crash, and he saw that His Profile was corrupted...
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And people still can't understand why ad/script blockers are popular.
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@lolwtf said:
And people still can't understand why ad/script blockers are popular.
The bigger question is, why do you go to sites like CNN? I mean, apart from looking for stories for here. The latter is a sacrifice which I greatly appreciate, for I am not brave enough to go there myself. I mean, they haven't ported NoScript to either lynx or elinks yet.
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@reverendryan said:
@North Bus said:
(i.e. over 6 days to hit 2^16, so I'm not even going to bother)
And lo, on the 7th day His Firefox did crash, and he saw that His Profile was corrupted...
I always figured that Firefox sidestepped the memory leak problem by using up all the memory in your system immediately upon starting, rather than waiting for a leak to take it gradually...
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@PeriSoft said:
I always figured that Firefox sidestepped the memory leak problem by using up all the memory in your system immediately upon starting, rather than waiting for a leak to take it gradually...
I don't have a problem with memory leaks in Firefox anymore. I use suspend to disk almost every time (only not if I need to boot Windows), and never close Firefox.
However, well, it closes itself from time to time. Completely crashes with no (visible) error message, just disappears. And if I start it again, there's no session recovery, it simply continues my last session as if it got never closed in the first place. This crash usually happens when I open some flash-laden page, especially YouTube user channels. There are other flash-laden pages that have never crashed though.
Is this normal?
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@derula said:
@PeriSoft said:
I always figured that Firefox sidestepped the memory leak problem by using up all the memory in your system immediately upon starting, rather than waiting for a leak to take it gradually...
I don't have a problem with memory leaks in Firefox anymore. I use suspend to disk almost every time (only not if I need to boot Windows), and never close Firefox.
However, well, it closes itself from time to time. Completely crashes with no (visible) error message, just disappears. And if I start it again, there's no session recovery, it simply continues my last session as if it got never closed in the first place. This crash usually happens when I open some flash-laden page, especially YouTube user channels. There are other flash-laden pages that have never crashed though.
Is this normal?
I assume this is on Linux? I still experience the memory leaks and after heavy browsing it's not unusual for FF to eat 1+ gigs of RAM and to slow to a crawl. I do have the random "errorless crashes" and it seems to be related to Flash, as you have noted. FlashBlock helps with this since most of the time the crashes are caused by Flash ads or other small widgets due to their increasing popularity on the web. That's not to say it doesn't sometimes crash on YouTube or some other site that makes extensive use of Flash, but the crashes seem to be directly proportional to the number of Flash objects viewed so eliminating unnecessary ones greatly reduces crashes.
However, I always get the session recovery dialog. Perhaps there is a setting for auto-recovering on restart that you have enabled? When FF memory use gets bad and performance drags to a crawl I just do a killall firefox and then restart and let the session recovery reload everything. It's hacky, but it works pretty well.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Pretty much describes the observed behaviour on my work laptop.@derula said:
However, well, it closes itself from time to time. Completely crashes with no (visible) error message, just disappears. And if I start it again, there's no session recovery, it simply continues my last session as if it got never closed in the first place. This crash usually happens when I open some flash-laden page, especially YouTube user channels. There are other flash-laden pages that have never crashed though.
Is this normal?I assume this is on Linux? [...]
However, I always get the session recovery dialog.
Running PCLinuxOS'09 and (from memory) FF3.5.3. Some of the 'silent' crashes I've pinned down to what turns out to be the rather WTF cross-compile[1] I need to run locally as part of my job; others I've no idea, but suspect having both Google Mail and Google Reader open in 2 of the tabs all the time can't be helping.
Home laptop is running XP with the FF nightly build, and apart from one irritating evening, I've not had any silent crashes. Home desktop (not mine - OH's) running XP and some variant of FF3 (I'm assuming 3.5.{2|3}, not looked at it for a couple of weeks) - no complaints.
--
[1] For those who care, and understand, it turns out that the cross compile both (WTF1) overwrites local libraries with those of the target, and (WTF2) uses local libraries to link with instead of the target ones. The happy coincidence that PCLinuxOS on Intel hardware is close to the target architecture means this 'hasn't been a problem' in the past.
It's starting to become one.
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@PJH said:
[1] For those who care, and understand, it turns out that the cross compile both (WTF1) overwrites local libraries with those of the target, and (WTF2) uses local libraries to link with instead of the target ones. The happy coincidence that PCLinuxOS on Intel hardware is close to the target architecture means this 'hasn't been a problem' in the past.
It's starting to become one.
Is FF installed from your package manager or are you just using the binary downloaded from mozilla.org?
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@morbiuswilters said:
I assume this is on Linux?
Yup.
@morbiuswilters said:
I still experience the memory leaks and after heavy browsing it's not unusual for FF to eat 1+ gigs of RAM and to slow to a crawl.
Nope, I don't recall Firefox ever using that much, even back in Windows, where it usually took around 300 meg. Here it seems to be at 100-200 usually (okay, maybe shared memory must be added, but I'm not an expert on that).
@morbiuswilters said:
However, I always get the session recovery dialog. Perhaps there is a setting for auto-recovering on restart that you have enabled?
Nope, it does pop up some other times, e.g., after killing the process.
Also, flash games are mostly unplayable. Mouse & direction keys work, but for other keys, flash only accepts them if I hold down Ctrl, Winkey or Alt. Sometimes only one of those work, sometimes multiple ones. Winkey seems to work most of the time, but if there's a text field in the flash, you will realize that it will insert a ë for some reason.
But that might be just me.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Package manager.@PJH said:
[1] For those who care, and understand, it turns out that the cross compile both (WTF1) overwrites local libraries with those of the target, and (WTF2) uses local libraries to link with instead of the target ones. The happy coincidence that PCLinuxOS on Intel hardware is close to the target architecture means this 'hasn't been a problem' in the past.
It's starting to become one.
Is FF installed from your package manager or are you just using the binary downloaded from mozilla.org?
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@PJH said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Package manager.@PJH said:
[1] For those who care, and understand, it turns out that the cross compile both (WTF1) overwrites local libraries with those of the target, and (WTF2) uses local libraries to link with instead of the target ones. The happy coincidence that PCLinuxOS on Intel hardware is close to the target architecture means this 'hasn't been a problem' in the past.
It's starting to become one.
Is FF installed from your package manager or are you just using the binary downloaded from mozilla.org?
Ah, I've had a lot of problems trying to use FF from a package manager. I just use the mozilla.org binaries because they are self-contained and I can update as soon as mozilla releases a new version and not worry about the package manager screwing up some dependency. It's also nice if you want to run multiple releases in parallel.
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@derula said:
However, well, it closes itself from time to time. Completely crashes with no (visible) error message, just disappears. And if I start it again, there's no session recovery, it simply continues my last session as if it got never closed in the first place. This crash usually happens when I open some flash-laden page, especially YouTube user channels. There are other flash-laden pages that have never crashed though.
Is this normal?
I notice that if I have a fairly large amount of tabs 150+ firefox gets really slow (fairly independant of hardware), but it doesn't really increase my load significantly (unless you count 0.30 on both a single core 1.6Ghtz and on a 2.4Ghtz dual-core a significant increase), it isn't heavy on CPU or RAM usage, and installing noscript seems to make it be able to get to a higher tab count before slowness reoccurs. Once the slowness sets in I notice there's a fairly high chance that FF will die, especially if another process raises the load, or additional tabs are opened (this starts occuring more around the 300-400 mark).
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@Lingerance said:
I notice that if I have a fairly large amount of tabs 150+
Normal use or stress testing? If the former, how do you manage them (and why so many?)
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@Lingerance said:
I notice that if I have a fairly large amount of tabs 150+ firefox gets really slow
I cannot quite envision a scenario in which [hundreds] of tabs are needed. What are they for? I only ever have "many" tabs open when I quickly shift-middle-click the Sidebar WTF forum updated threads, which rarely exceeds 10. Or is it exactly that, just repeated for a dozen several news/blog/forum sites?
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@dhromed said:
I cannot quite envision a scenario in which [hundreds] of tabs are needed. What are they for?
I keep them open instead of bookmarking, thus it isn't from stress-testing (as a previous comment implied). It's mostly just a bad habbit that started getting to the point of rediculousness. I actually make reference to having absurd numbers of open tabs frequently enough (I think my record was 1200 split between three computers' firefox processes).
As for content I tend to have, note that the higher the tab count the harder it is to find a specif open tab and thus the more likely I'll open a tab with the same content:- Forum posts
- Slashdot news articles/comments
- Nagios/Monit sessions
- Web comics (I have about 20 that I read regularly, and ~70 that I have open but haven't started reading yet)
- Blog articles from searching for information
- Program sites (as a reminder to download, install and try out the programs)
- Reference sites
- Images from when I get bored and start looking for porn, but then get to lazy to right click and save the image
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@dhromed said:
Porn ofcourse.@Lingerance said:
I notice that if I have a fairly large amount of tabs 150+ firefox gets really slow
I cannot quite envision a scenario in which [hundreds] of tabs are needed. What are they for? I only ever have "many" tabs open when I quickly shift-middle-click the Sidebar WTF forum updated threads, which rarely exceeds 10. Or is it exactly that, just repeated for a dozen several news/blog/forum sites?
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@dhromed said:
I cannot quite envision a scenario in which [hundreds] of tabs are needed. What are they for? I only ever have "many" tabs open when I quickly shift-middle-click the Sidebar WTF forum updated threads, which rarely exceeds 10. Or is it exactly that, just repeated for a dozen several news/blog/forum sites?
I did it accidentally once, when I clicked the "Open All In Tabs" at the bottom of one of my bookmarks folders-- I think it had about 80 bookmarks in it. I let Firefox chug for about 5-6 minutes, then force-quit it... considering that, I can't imagine how long it takes to recover 150-ish bookmarks after a crash or something. How do you have the patience?
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@blakeyrat said:
I can't imagine how long it takes to recover 150-ish bookmarks after a crash or something. How do you have the patience?
I takes abour 5-6 minutes, honestly though I just do something else while I'm waiting.
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@Lingerance said:
As for content I tend to have, note that the higher the tab count the harder it is to find a specif open tab and thus the more likely I'll open a tab with the same content:[...]
In other words: you have waaay to much time on your hands and waaay to little life?
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@Lingerance said:
@blakeyrat said:
I can't imagine how long it takes to recover 150-ish bookmarks after a crash or something. How do you have the patience?
I takes abour 5-6 minutes, honestly though I just do something else while I'm waiting.You have mental issues, don't you?
