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