firefox does not render some pages some of the time

[empraptor]

Binary package hint: firefox

Was using Firefox 2.0.0.10 on Ubuntu 7.10

Some pages did not render at all. Right-clicking did not display context menus.
  The pages did get fetched from the webistes because the title bar displayed the title and I could go into "View"->"Page Source" to see the source.

Reloading did not resolve the problem. It started working correctly again an hour or so later.

One page that did not render:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Nov 30 23:32:11 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.10
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: firefox 2.0.0.10+2nobinonly-0ubuntu1.7.10.1
PackageArchitecture: i386
SourcePackage: firefox
Uname: Linux shuttle 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Sun Oct 14 23:05:12 GMT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Thanks for this bug report and for your contribution.

I can't reproduce this bug with the website link that you provided. Can you reproduce this problem? If yes, can you provide very detailed informations about the problem and about how to reproduce it? It would be great if you mention all the webpages where this problem happens and the outputs that you get if you launch firefox from a terminal.

Can you also confirm if you can reproduce that problem if you use a clean new firefox profile? You can create a new firefox profile by typing this on a terminal : firefox -P

Also if you experience a crash with Firefox, you can follow that procedure to get valuable debug files that you can attach to this bug report.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs?action=show&redirect=DebuggingFirefox#head-c576e78d92cb3c959c271158b6ace98be835de83

[Tom Anthony (t-c-anthony)]

I am experiencing this exact same problem right now.

Pages appear to arrive, but the contents of whatever is in that window don't change. The address bar and title bar do update though, and I cannot get contextual menus. View source shows the correct source code for the page I should be seeing.

Launching with -P from the terminal didn't help the problem.

Some pages that don't appear to work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality
http://www.seio.es/test/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/
http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/

Whereas, Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google searches, bbc.co.uk homepage, this site and various others are all working.

The behaviour is erratic. I just went to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat

in a page that already had some content. It failed to render, as above. I then clicked the "random link" link (which was there from the wikipedia page I had there prior to trying the Goat page. I got taken to this URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland_Route_260

It also failed to render, but the Goat page appeared. I clicked another link, which worked, then back which showed the Maryland Route 260 page.

Whereas some other pages, no amount of link clicking and going back, or refreshing or trying a new tab can seem to make them appear.

Also if another note that may help. I ran a search for Rhino in Google, and tried to go to:

http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/

Which failed, so I then clicked the top link (which was still visible as the Mozilla page never appeared) for Rhino.com, which did work. Clicking back changed the URL to the Mozilla URL, but the page stayed as the Rhino.com. Clicking back again took me back to the Google results which appeared. Clicking forward change the title/URL to the Mozilla page, which still doesn't appear.

I have no clue what is going on. I am running Ubuntu 7.10 and FF 2.0.0.8.

[Tom Anthony (t-c-anthony)]

Closing all my instances of FF and reopening it seems to have made the problem go away.

[empraptor (empraptor)]

I ran into this bug again and made a few more observations.

Was using Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Ubuntu 7.10 to view

http://www.domainbyproxy.com/

First tab displaying this bug was grey. Opened a few tabs to browse other
sites and they were fine. Afterwards, directed browser to the problematic
URL on a new tab. The bug displayed there also, except the page was white
instead of grey. All subsequent tabs with bug displayed white.

Refreshing, retyping the URL, etc all resulted in the same symptoms - the
document is retrieved as evidenced by the title bar but the page is not
displayed and no context menu appears when right-clicking within the tab.

http://www.domainbyproxy.com/index.html

gives me a 404 page but the bug is still there.

"View"->"View Source" opens source window but does not show any content
initially.

Maximizing, restoring, or resizing the browser/source window will cause
page/source to render. This remedy works only if the tab is in focus.
Changing size of parent window while another tab is in focus does not render
the page on the tab with bug.

Once the page is rendered correctly on a tab, I wasn't able to recreate the
bug on the same tab. Bug continues to occur on new tabs, though.

After some time, the bug could not be produced again.

Dunno what's special about the website that could cause this problem. The
domain name? DOCTYPE declaration? Character encoding?

Maybe the problem lies with a component involved in rendering to display
area which is shared by both page and source view windows.

Could it be the proprietary ATI driver I'm using? But in that case can't
think why the bug applies just to certain sites and doesn't happen all the
time.

-Paul

On Jan 21, 2008 11:19 AM, Tom Anthony <email address hidden> wrote:

> Closing all my instances of FF and reopening it seems to have made the
> problem go away.
>
> --
> firefox does not render some pages some of the time
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/173190
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

--
http://wagonfly.blogspot.com/
http://empraptor.homeip.net/
<email address hidden>
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[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

I also confirm this problem. I can't reproduce it using the steps described in this bug report, but it happens sometime. I suspect that this bug as something do to with Compiz and ( in my case ) restricted nvidia driver. Can someone reproduce this bug WITHOUT compiz enabled? Thanks to everyone who works on this bug report.

[Anthony Mills (amills)]

I suffer this problem occasionally as well both on my work computer (Kubuntu 7.10 running Compiz) and my Laptop and home desktop machines (running Kubuntu 7.10 without compiz). So i definitely dont think this is any way compiz related. It seems to occur mainly after you have been working in the browser for a long time (5 hours + normally does the trick). The problem always fixes itself though after a browser restart.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Definitively the same bug. Can you reproduce it whithout compiz enabled?

[Anthony Mills (amills)]

Yes it happens from tme to time on all my machines regardless of if they are using compiz or not.

[kurt belgrave (trinikrono)]

Hey empraptor
Can you test this behaviour on the latest ubuntu release (lucid) and see if you are still affected
Cheers

[kurt belgrave (trinikrono)]

We'd like to figure out what's causing this bug for you, but we haven't heard back from you in a while. Could you please provide the requested information? Thanks!

[Anthony Mills (amills)]

Hi Kurt, I would probably mark it as closed I haven't seen it pop up in the more recent releases.

[empraptor (empraptor)]

Sorry for the late response.

I haven't run into the issue recently on the machine I experienced the problem on. I'm not sure which version of Ubuntu/Firefox fixed the issue for me since I know of no way to reproduce the bug reliably. I am currently running Firefox 3.6.4 on Ubuntu 9.04.

I have another machine running Ubuntu 10.04 with Firefox 3.6.6 (x86_64), and I have not run into this issue yet on that environment.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

This bug report is being closed due to your last comment regarding this being fixed with an update. For future reference you can manage the status of your own bugs by clicking on the current status in the yellow line and then choosing a new status in the revealed drop down box. You can learn more about bug statuses at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status . Thank you again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please submit any future bugs you may find.