Approximately three weeks ago, I started seeing a strange problem when I would access pages on the website for the Baltimore Sun. As of today, I have notified the folks behind the Sun’s website of this issue via the form available here. To summarize, there is a banner advertisement that gets called when one visits the website that caused Firefox to consume large amounts of memory and become unresponsive. In some cases, the machine I am working on has become unresponsive.
I consume most of my links to the Sun’s website via their RSS feeds. When I encounter an article that seems worth reading, I will click on that link from within FeedDemon, and the link will load in a browser tab in Firefox. When I am done scanning through my feeds, I have a Firefox window with multiple tabs open to different pages on the Sun’s website. I can then review these articles at my leisure. For a long time, this has worked with no problem whatsoever.
When I first observed this problem, I thought I had encountered the memory consumption problem Firefox 2 has been known to exhibit. The problem was a bit different, though, as the browser just became unresponsive as I could see it loading one of the links to the Sun’s website on a tab. Normally, the Firefox memory problem exhibits itself when a window has a number of tabs open or when Firefox has been open for a long period of time. When I brought up Task Manager (or Process Explorer), I could see a spike in processor utilization and a rapid increase in the amount of memory the firefox.exe process was consuming. In one case on my home machine, I had to forcefully exit Firefox using PsKill, as it had hung my desktop.
With all of this in mind, I decided to investigate the cause of the problem. I immediately came to hypothesize that some advertisement that is loaded when the page being requested is loading had to be the cause of the problem. To verify my hypothesis, I decided to make use of an ad-blocking extension for Firefox. I have used the following two extensions:
The use of either extension is a successful workaround for this problem. Since I have installed Adblock Plus on both of my workstations at home and the office, I have yet to see this behavior. With some certainty, I can say there is a problem with the advertising hosted via the Sun’s web pages. Still, I presume the advertising executives for the Sun are none to happy to read that one needs to use an extension to block their ads to merely access their site. Eventually, most users will stop accessing the site, as most users will not want to or know how to install an extension.
I have seen this problem on two different PCs, both from two different hardware manufacturers. Additionally, the problem has happened with Firefox with my usual stable of extensions, the handful of extensions I run on my corporate workstation, and a profile that had no extensions installed. In all three cases, I have been able to observe a page on the Sun’s website effectively hanging the browser and having a deleterious effect on system performance.
If you care to see if you experience the problem here are the steps to reproduce:
- Open Firefox. Make sure you have the latest version of Firefox 2 (2.0.0.11). To do so, click About Mozilla Firefox from the Help menu. If you are not running the latest version, select the HELP menu again, and select Check for Updates…
- Go to the Sun’s website, http://www.baltimoresun.com in the address bar.
- Open up multiple tabs to different pages of the site. The easiest way to do this would be to hold down the CTRL button while left-clicking on links from the Sun’s homepage.
- Observe if Firefox appears to hang or if your workstation hangs. If it does, bring up Task Manager and forcefully exit Firefox. This can be accomplished by performing one of the following:
- click on the icon for Firefox in the Applications tab and select End Task;
- click on the Processes tab, select firefox.exe in the list of processes and click End Process.
- click on the icon for Firefox in the Applications tab and select End Task;
If you have seen or are able to reproduce this behavior using the above steps, please leave a comment below. If I hear nothing tomorrow, I will pester whomever is manning the feedback mailbox with the URL to this post.
{ 14 } Comments
I was able to load a half-dozen tabs or so in the latest version of Firefox. No locked up application, aside from some slow loading and increasing memory usage. I do run AdBlock Plus 0.7.5.3 and I suspect that’s preventing some stupid Flash ads from loading.
I was able to load a half-dozen tabs or so in the latest version of Firefox. No locked up application, aside from some slow loading and increasing memory usage. I do run AdBlock Plus 0.7.5.3 and I suspect that's preventing some stupid Flash ads from loading.
Alex: Something tells me it is a bad Flash ad. Try doing the same thing with ABP disabled. That should trigger the problem.
Alex: Something tells me it is a bad Flash ad. Try doing the same thing with ABP disabled. That should trigger the problem.
I experienced the same problems as JJT — and I agree it’s probably a bad Flash ad. When I was waiting for the page to load, FF seemed to hang up while waiting on an ad for Amazon.com to load. I installed AdBlock — no problems whatsoever after that.
The Sun really needs to get its act together.
I experienced the same problems as JJT — and I agree it's probably a bad Flash ad. When I was waiting for the page to load, FF seemed to hang up while waiting on an ad for Amazon.com to load. I installed AdBlock — no problems whatsoever after that.
The Sun really needs to get its act together.
I know I’ll get bitch slapped for this, but Macs don’t have this issue.
I know I'll get bitch slapped for this, but Macs don't have this issue.
George: I have not had a chance to post the Sun’s response, but it was a third=party AmEx ad that was the cause of the problem. Besides, chances are Safari in all craptacular glory doesn’t even display the page. (I might tag you as a Mac spammer on my blog, by the way.)
George: I have not had a chance to post the Sun's response, but it was a third=party AmEx ad that was the cause of the problem. Besides, chances are Safari in all craptacular glory doesn't even display the page. (I might tag you as a Mac spammer on my blog, by the way.)
I was mostly joking. I have run into sites that don’t get correctly rendered by Firefox at times and wonder if I should contact the site or report it to Firefox, as I can see that turning into a turf war.
FYI, I don’t use Safari, as I don’t think it works as well as Firefox.
I was mostly joking. I have run into sites that don't get correctly rendered by Firefox at times and wonder if I should contact the site or report it to Firefox, as I can see that turning into a turf war.
FYI, I don't use Safari, as I don't think it works as well as Firefox.
@George: I know you were mostly joking, but I had fears of Safari use. I agree on the problems being browser turf wars, but most sites have gotten good about being cross-browser compatible.
@George: I know you were mostly joking, but I had fears of Safari use. I agree on the problems being browser turf wars, but most sites have gotten good about being cross-browser compatible.
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