[Karmic] Right-clicking on a bookmark in Firefox hangs the whole desktop

[Tristan Schmelcher]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.5

(Also occurs with firefox-3.0)

Sometimes when I right-click on a bookmark in Firefox's Bookmarks menu, the browser and the entire desktop hang. I can still move the mouse pointer, but all input is ignored. I can only recover the system by switching to a virtual terminal and killing Firefox. I have attached a symbolicized stack trace of the hang that I took back on Firefox 3.0.

The bug seems to be related to the contents of the clipboard. i.e., clipboard content can be "bad" somehow, and if I right-click on a bookmark with "bad" content in the clipboard then the bug always occurs. I say this for two reasons:

1) After killing Firefox, I can always make the bug happen again immediately by re-opening Firefox and right-clicking on a bookmark.
2) If I copy new text from somewhere with Ctrl+C and then right-click on a bookmark then the bug does _not_ occur.

I have identified one application that consistently repros the bug if I copy text from it: Quartus II. Unfortunately though it is not free, so you'd have to buy it to repro this way. It does not cause any problem when I copy its text to other apps.

Note that I am technically on Jaunty, but with lots of Karmic packages installed (including firefox-3.5), so the below output may be confusing.

I am opening this bug against the X server too, because it is a serious bug in its design for an application to be able to hang the whole desktop.

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 9.04
Release: 9.04
$ apt-cache policy firefox-3.5
firefox-3.5:
  Installed: 3.5.3+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu2
  Candidate: 3.5.3+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu2
  Version table:
 *** 3.5.3+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu2 0
        400 http://archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.5.2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com jaunty-updates/universe Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com jaunty-security/universe Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com jaunty-security/universe Packages
     3.5~b4~hg20090330r24021+nobinonly-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/universe Packages
$

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: firefox-3.5 3.5.3+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-15-generic i686

[Tristan Schmelcher (tschmelcher)]

Could be related to bug #372103.

[Tristan Schmelcher (tschmelcher)]

FYI, I bought a new computer recently and it experiences this bug in the exact same situations with the Quartus II program that I mentioned, except that Firefox crashes as described in bug 372103 instead of hanging the desktop as described here, so evidently the bugs have the same root cause. But for some reason on my old computer the bug manifested as a hang of the desktop rather than a browser crash.

I don't consider this a dupe though, because the ability for a program to hang the desktop is a bug in and of itself.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hi tpkschme,

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? (ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/)

If it remains an issue, could you also attach a new /var/log/Xorg.0.log?
Thanks in advance.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Tristan Schmelcher (tschmelcher)]

I think there's basically zero chance of still being able to debug the hang problem at this late in the game. It was triggered by bug 372103, but that got fixed ages ago. Additionally, the computer on which I experiencing the hang has had a complete OS reinstall since then (and the Quartus II software is no longer on it), so whatever was making bug 372103 cause a hang is probably also gone.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Okay thanks for getting back to us. I'll close out the xserver bug

[drew212 (mstngdrew212)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner.
There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test the current Ubuntu development version (10.04). If you can test it, and it is still an issue, we would appreciate if you could upload updated logs by running apport-collect 429819, and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Tristan Schmelcher (tschmelcher)]

As I mentioned to Bryce, there is no chance of repro'ing this anymore.