Firefox 3 and howtoforge.com

There is currently a bug in firefox 3 which causes it to crash with an XError BadAloc when you go to any page hosted on howtoforge.

This seems to be related to the image at http://howtoforge.com/themes/htf_glass/images/bg_header_bottom_left15.png. I suggest you don’t click on that link :)

Apparently this image is 10,000 pixels wide. It looks like this is probably a GTK issue since the same problem happended when I opened the image with evince!

I tried writing a greasemonkey script to get around this problem but it loads too late to avert the crash. So iptables to the rescue.

iptables -I OUTPUT -d howtoforge.com -m string –algo bm –to 70 –string “GET /themes/htf_glass/images/bg_header_bottom_left15.png” -j DROP

iptables  
    -I OUTPUT \ # Match packets levaing my laptop
    -d howtoforge.com  \ # Only packets going to howtoforge
    -m string \ # Invoke the string matcher
    --algo bm \ # Pick a matching algorithm
    --to 70 \ # Only check the first 70 bytes of each packet
    --string "GET /themes/htf_glass/images/bg_header_bottom_left15.png" \ 
    -j DROP # Drop the sucker
This entry was written by johnf, posted on March 19, 2008 at 12:07 pm, filed under Hacks and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

One Comment

  1. Ranty McRanterson
    Posted March 24, 2008 at 5:26 pm | Permalink

    So you’ve confirmed that random other gnome apps have the same problem.

    I’ve confirmed that my Firefox3b4 doesn’t have the same problem (running on OS X 10.5)

    So.. Is it really a bug in firefox?

    btw, I like the mooing..

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