Bug#562698: iceweasel: crashes randomly and never figures out why

[Li He]

Package: iceweasel
Version: 3.5.6-1
Severity: important

I am suffering from the random crashes of iceweasel possibly from 3.5.x versions.
I tried many of them, 3.5.2, 3.5.3, 3.5.4, 3.5.5 and now 3.5.6. They all crash 
randomly. I googled many times and I found there are guys reporting similar bugs.
Some of them are even told their claimed bug is fixed but to my own experience
iceweasel never stops this random crashes.

First I tried to create a new profile, since it is said the old profile might
include something that crashes the program. But soon I found out the crash still
occurs.

Later I found someone says you might create an empty ~/.mozilla. So I removed my
~/.mozilla and start up an iceweasel without any extensions or plugins. But all
of a sudden, the browser crashed again.

So I think it has nothing to do with plugins or extensions. It is simply from
iceweasel itself. Don't tell me it has anything to do with the kernel. During
this period, 2.6.29, 2.6.30, 2.6.31(-trunk) and now 2.6.32-trunk. And the driver,
someone says the video driver might cause trouble. But if I remember well,
I did configured it properly (with radeon for ATI X1400 on a T60 thinkpad).

I can't trace with iceweasel -g option (with iceweasel-dbg and xulrunner-dbg 
installed). I can see there is a gdb process after executing the command but 
I wait for 5-6 minutes and nothing happens (the harddisk was not even reading
anything). I did try without iceweasel-dbg some time earlier. The tracing was
not successful gdb only provided very limited information, which is almost
identical to some earlier bug report.

This random crash happens when a tab is closed, either by clicking the x on
top of the tab or press Ctrl-W. The gdb will claim there is a seg fault due to
an image (if I remember well). If I restart the firefox, sometimes it will
notify me to restore the last session due to a crash but sometimes it will
simply restore the session without any notification (as if nothing happens).

I am very serious about this problem since I can't bear it any more. Just think
about it. Every 10-20 minites surfing the web, the browser crashes and you have
to restart it. In Windows, this never happens. If any more information is demanded
I will try to provide ASAP. But so far, I just got this simple description.

Sometimes I even suspect that the crash is caused by my input method. But now
I think I am wrong about it. I tried ibus and scim. Browers like arora do have
some conflicts with ibus. They crash when I type with ibus triggered. But this
never happens with iceweasel, with neither scim nor ibus.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-trunk-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages iceweasel depends on:
ii  debianutils             3.2.2            Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  fontconfig              2.6.0-4.2        generic font configuration library
ii  libc6                   2.10.2-2         GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libgcc1                 1:4.5-20091223-1 GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0            2.23.0-1         The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0             2.19.1-1         The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libnspr4-0d             4.8.2-1          NetScape Portable Runtime Library
ii  libstdc++6              4.5-20091223-1   The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  procps                  1:3.2.8-2        /proc file system utilities
ii  psmisc                  22.8-1           utilities that use the proc file s
ii  xulrunner-1.9.1         1.9.1.6-1        XUL + XPCOM application runner

iceweasel recommends no packages.

Versions of packages iceweasel suggests:
pn  latex-xft-fonts       <none>             (no description available)
ii  libkrb53              1.6.dfsg.4~beta1-9 Transitional library package/krb4 
pn  mozplugger            <none>             (no description available)
pn  ttf-mathematica4.1    <none>             (no description available)
ii  xfonts-mathml         3                  Type1 Symbol font for MathML
pn  xprint                <none>             (no description available)
pn  xulrunner-1.9.1-gnome <none>             (no description available)

-- no debconf information