Re: Possible solution to Netscape crashing problem (was Re: Release-critical Bugreport for January 7, 2000)
On 11 Jan 2000, Greg Stark wrote:
> Stefan Gybas <stefan@gybas.com> writes:
>
> > The libc6 version of Netscape crashes when you close one of its windows or
> > try to quit the program since the X libs were compiled using egcs/gcc 2.95.
>
> Unfortunately that's the least of the problems. For many people it crashes
> whenever you start Java, run javascript while it's decoding a gif, or just
> randomly every few minutes (if you're lucky).
Yes. I just tried it with the current navigator-smotif-47 package in
potato (which is linked against libc5). Merely loading
http://java.sun.com/ crashes Netscape with a Bus Error if Java is enabled.
With Java disabled, it works fine.
> There seems to be very little pattern between who it crashes for and who it
> doesn't. But I just got a hunch, People who find the glibc netscape unusably
> unstable or totally rock solid: How fast a net connection do you have?
I have a fairly fast connection through the TV cable.
> I think my problems with netscape coincided with getting a faster net
> connection. I remember being able to use it fairly reliably on my 14.4kbps,
> and now it's completely unusable on an ADSL line.
I have never used Netscape on Linux with a connection that "slow", but I
can remember Netscape always either freezing or crashing on any page that
includes Java code. I don't remember if this was also the case before
Debian switched to glibc (I did use Netscape on Debian back then).
> This would make perfect sense if the race condition were between the rendering
> engine and the network layer. On the 14.4 the rendering engine could probably
> always finish parsing the data before the next packet came in and everything
> was idle when the network layer tried to interrupt.
I dunno. I remember somebody saying something about an obscure egcs bug
that caused some tiny error in the X libraries, which caused Netscape to
crash whenever a window was closed. This has happened to me, too, but only
with glibc Netscape.
Remco
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