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

[Mike Hommey]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 10:16:53AM +0800, Li He wrote:
> 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.

Could you try the instructions in /usr/share/bug/iceweasel/presubj, most
notably, the one to disable plugins.

Thanks

Mike