User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/20060903 Epiphany/2.14 Firefox/1.5.0.5 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/20060903 Epiphany/2.14 Firefox/1.5.0.5 When restarting a Firefox session windows (tabs) which require posting data (POSTDATA), i.e. form data, will open a dialog box whether to repost the data or cancel the posting of the data. When this happens all other window activity stops! Network transfers cease and other window activity (allocating memory, formatting pages) seems to stop as well -- though this might be due to the stopping of network activity. This can be a significant problem if one is restarting a Firefox session with 75 windows and hundreds of tabs. The dialog box requesting whether to post or cancel the POSTDATA may be hidden behind many windows. By the time the dialog box is unearthed and responded to many of the web server connections may have timed out. The only workaround is to minimize non-dialog windows as quickly as possible to reveal the dialog box and enter a response. Even this may result in web server timeouts and windows (tabs) failing to be restarted. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Session Manager Extension (0.4.2 but probably isn't important) 2. Open web site with dialog boxes (Bugzilla.mozilla.org, PirateBay, etc.). 3. Fill out a form and submit it. 4. Open many other windows/tabs (pick random /. sites or digg sites) -- URLs are unimportant, quantity is of URLs is. 5. Save the session (or crash Fireofox by causing it to run out of memory). 6. Restart the session. Dialog box requesting the reposting of data should hidden behind other windows. Actual Results: Session reload "hangs" until POSTDATA dialog box is completed. Expected Results: 1. All windows (tabs) associated with URLs *except* those which require a POSTDATA response should reload properly when a session is restarted. 2. Windows (tabs) associated with POSTDATA which require dialog responses should be forced to the forefront of the window collection (so they can be dealt with quickly). Alternatively, restarting of windows should stop until those which require POSTDATA responses are dealt with (thus the POSTDATA dialog) is always the "top" window/tab). Due to Firefox's poor memory management it is easy to consume large amounts of memory [1]. That in turn will result in crashes if the soft virtual memory limit is exceeded (which has to be set to avoid Linux thrashing as memory heap scans are done if Firefox Memory > ~70% of physical memory) or if swap space is exceeded (both of these produce new/malloc() failures which Firefox rarely handles properly). Crashes in turn result in having to reload the sessions. Sessions reloads which hang on POSTDATA dialogs cause HTTP/server timeouts. This requires having to close Firefox and restart it with careful attention being paid to what Windows/Tabs require responses. When a large number of windows and tabs are involved it can easily take 30 minutes or more to get back to the state the browser was in before the Popup window (Bug 352178) or memory allocation abort caused Firefox to terminate. When Firefox crashes more frequently than Windows Blue Screen of Death's occur (back in the Windows 98/Windows 2000 early days) and when it takes longer to restart Firefox than it did to reboot Windows -- you can hardly be considered to have a "robust" product. 1. I used to push Firefox to ~400MB on a 512MB machine, now I routinely push it to 1.1-1.3GB on a 1.5GB machine. Firefox isn't "free" if I have to go spend $80 on memory and that *still* doesn't solve the problem.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 324157 ***