Version 3.04 conflicts with BabelFish (BabelFish fixed with v.1.88!)
Hello,
With the latest Updatescanner update (3.04) I got severe problems on opening the update frames:
Sometimes the Update-Frame (current page) was blank, other times Firefox used 100% CPU and I had to kill and restart it.
As I visited this forum I found a thread where my own addon BabelFish was suspected to cause some problems.
Since I am the author of the BabelFish addon, I immediately investigated that issue, looking for a possible BabelFish involvement.
I found that it was true, BabelFish really had problems.
Concerning BabelFish it was a *very* simple BabelFish regex function that made Firefox to use all CPU, obviously caused by the extraordinary length of your data URL.
Note that the regex was really simple: /.+\.txt$/.test(document.location.href)
With BabelFish 1.88 I fixed that problem by using the lastIndexOf method instead (works fine).
I just want to inform you about the issues that happened here.
There is evidence for Firefox problems ever when your long data URL meets a regex.
(BTW: I would have appreciated if you had informed my about that BabelFish issue.)
Re: Version 3.04 conflicts with BabelFish and AdBlock Plus ...
Addendum:
Note that many addons might use regular expressions on the current URL.
This could explain the many bug reports with the latest UpdateScanner update.
I know that this is not caused by invalid UpdateScanner code, long data URL's are valid.
However, Firefox seems to have a real problem with regex applied to very long strings (like your data URL). So it is much more a Firefox bug, even if the limited string length for regular expressions is considered. Firefox should not hang in that case.
Re: Version 3.04 conflicts with BabelFish and AdBlock Plus ...
Thanks very much for your quick work, and sorry not to have contacted you about this yet - I was hoping to come up with a Babelfish patch to make things easier for you. I agree it would have been better for me to contact you sooner, and if I'd had any free time yesterday evening I would have.
Point taken: some extensions probably implicitly assume that all URIs are relatively short, and there is a danger that long data URIs might cause them to lock up - particularly in regexp code. I'll look implementing a different way of injecting untrusted HTML that doesn't use on long data URIs. It's also important that other extensions are modified to handle this, and I appreciate the excellent work you have done to achieve this with the Babelfish extension.
Regarding AdblockPlus:
I have it installed and running the EasyList filter and haven't seen any problems. I haven't changed any about:config parameters, and am using default settings. What filters do you have installed? Have you made any changes to the default configuration?
Thanks again for your help with this, it's much appreciated!
Re: Version 3.04 conflicts with BabelFish and AdBlock Plus ...
Well, sometimes things seem to be even more complicated...
Too hard for me to evaluate exactly what's going on.
Reading that you could not verify the Adblock problem I ran one more test with an empty Firefox profile.
With that new profile I was unable to reproduce the problem.
Then I was trying latest version of UpdateScanner with my default profile again. I still get the same AdblockPlus error. Strange.
See http://i40.tinypic.com/21nmz55.jpg
Note that I get that error even with NO adblock filters installed (virgin Adblock, no subscription).
However, I found a simple solution.
I already knew that removing the AdblockPlus preference "extensions.adblockplus.whitelistschemes" could solve the problem (for what reason ever).
With my empty profile test I also found that newer Adblock versions do not set this pref anymore.
So I simply removed that obviously obsolete preference and everything works fine now (with latest UpdateScanner).
I also will edit my first posting here: I was unable to reproduce the issue and users too easily believe what they are reading, thus it is better I remove my Adblock conflict suspicions.
Re: Version 3.04 conflicts with BabelFish (BabelFish fixed ...
Thanks for you investigations, it sounds a bit like an old rogue piece of AdblockPlus code... but if anyone is still having problems with AdblockPlus errors, please post here with details, and I'll take a look