Comment 214 for bug 240242

I've been keeping a careful eye on this bug on my OS X 10.4 intel machine, and here's what I've seen:

-Something about my machine made this bug happen pretty easily -- just a few hours running FlashBlock and Firefox versions 3.0.8 and earlier. So I ditched Flashblock.

-Without any plugins, I still saw exactly this bug -- hitting return in the url bar does nothing -- maybe about once a month for a total of 3 times. That was Firefox 3.0.8 and earlier. Though very rare, that obviously suggests that the bug is not exclusively a plugin problem, although obviously plugins can do something to trigger it. The Flashblock authors claimed their code did not have the window flaw associated with this bug.

-I've been running 3.0.9 and later both with and without Flashblock, and I have not seen the bug since. I used to see the bug in just a few hours, and now it's been a week and I have not seen it. Therefore, I think there's a real chance that the underlying flaw got fixed in Firefox 3.0.9 or later.

So if you have a favorite plugin that has problems with this bug... you might want to try it again with the latest firefox and see if the plugin now works right.

Moving forward, I think "invalid" is a reasonable state for this bug unless someone sees it happening with Firefox 3.0.10 or later and no plugins. In reality, I think there was an underlying Firefox bug and it got fixed.

I agree with the sentiments above that Firefox cannot get sucked into handling bugs in plugins. However, that means Firefox will have a sort of blind spot where bugs that for whatever reason are associated with plugins tend to be ingored. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that's what happened here.