Mac OS X Sheet Lock Up

[RedHatDude]

I'm running FF .8 on a freshly installed Panther (10.3) imac 1ghz with 768 MB RAM

FF locks up sometimes when a dialog pops up. This isn't a pop up window, but an internal popup dialog from FF ("cannot find blah.blah.com", or a printing dialog for example). The dialog is a sheet in OS X. When this happens the "OK" button on the sheet doesn't work, and I can't access any of my other browser windows and am forced to kill FF.

Anyone else have this happen?

[digi]

I'm seeing this same sheet-locking behavior under Firefox 0.9.3 on Mac OS X 10.3.5. Firefox seems to reach this state about once every couple of hours for me, which is extremely annoying.

One limited workaround that I've found is that I can scroll the page under the frozen sheet using the mouse scroll wheel. Also, I can choose Quit from the File menu, so I don't have to force quit. In fact, I can even open new windows from the File menu, but once the sheet-locking has happened, the address bar of new windows no longer shows the URL for the current page.

I have browsed the entries for Browser and Firefox in the Mozilla Bugzilla database, but I cannot find any offical bug entries that match the sheet-locking behavior described here. But, since I don't review the Mozilla bugs in Bugzilla often, I'm not sure I'm looking in the right places. Can someone else confirm that this bug is not officially in Bugzilla? If so, we should make sure it gets in there right away.

[kiehlster]

I'm also having this issue with Firefox 0.9.3 on OSX 10.3.5 even after removing 0.9 and installing 0.9.3. Usually I go to cancel a sheet and it locks up the browser and all I can do is quit or press the opposing button(s) on the sheet to no end. This is on an eMac 700Mhz G4 with 512 MB RAM. My love for Firefox is the only reason I won't switch to Safari despite this huge annoyance.

[digi]

Can a more experienced user of this forum please tell us how we should promote this important issue to official bug status?

[©dn]

Turning on xul error pages will alleviate the problem - MacOS X Firefox is buggier than Linux or Windows.

user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true);

[digi]

Thanks for the suggestion, but turning on xul error pages did not fix things for me. I have now installed Firefox 1.0PR1 and the problem persists, unfortunately. I guess I will now try and fill out an official bug report. I'm a little unsure about doing this properly so it gets the attention it deserves, but here goes...

[kiehlster]

One thing I've noticed with this bug is that it only really occurs after using FF for a long period of time, or just after the computer's been in sleep mode. I have other issues with Thunderbird that seem to occur after the same sort of usage. Think this has something to do with not having them compiled perfectly for OSX?

[digi]

It looks like our prayers have finally been answered! Before filing the bug, I followed the usual procedure of checking both with Mozilla and Firefox. And wouldn't you know... Mozilla didn't seem to have the problem any more. A search of recently resolved browser bugs led me here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232715

It turns out that our problem was first reported back in January and it's taken this long to track it down to some bizarre sleep related issues, particularly on PowerBooks! The comments make a pretty interesting read, since solving the problem involved some careful detective work.

I can't tell from the last comment if the fix has been incorporated in the most recent Firefox nightly build, but I'm going to try it now. You can be sure the fix will be in the next release candidate.