Firefox crashes GNOME when visiting certain sites

Asked by Ryan Cutter

I'm new to Ubuntu. Running Ubuntu 10.10 on my Gateway netbook in Desktop mode with GNOME 2.32.0. Firefox is 3.6.10.

On certain web sites (apple.com for instance), Firefox will initially load the page fine then the entire GUI quickly becomes corrupted. Lots of squiggly lines and weird symbols where English text should be. Even the menu items at the top of the screen outside the Firefox window are unusable. The only recourse is a system reboot.

It seems to happen on more sophisticated web sites - low-fi sites like yahoo.com work fine. As far as plug-ins, I have Shockwave Flash 10.1 r102 and QuickTime 7.6.6. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Ryan

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Ryan Cutter
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mycae (mycae) said :
#1

Try disabling flash and quicktime; see if this causes the progblem to go away -- this will help to narrow down the problem.

Revision history for this message
Ryan Cutter (ryancutter) said :
#2

Disabled flash, quicktime, and all other add-ins. Same problem.

Chromium works fine on all sites Firefox is apparently struggling with.

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A. Denton (aquina) said :
#3

Hy Ryan!

Assuming your installation is ok and there is nothing broken I'd have a look at flash and deactivate or uninstall it.

To check your installation execute:

apt-get check
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get clean
apt-get autoclean
apt-get autoremove
dpkg --purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall | cut -f1`
apt-get check

To see the flash stuff enter:

sudo dpkg-query -l | grep flash

This should return »adobe-flashplugin«. Verify it's a current version. If so try a development version from a PPA or uninstall it completely.

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Ryan Cutter (ryancutter) said :
#4

Thanks for the suggestions. After doing this, I've got the current flash and got upgraded to Firefox 3.6.12 (from 3.6.10) but I still experience the same problems.

I pulled down Firefox 4.0b8pre and it seems to work fine (just like Chromium). So the problem is only with Firefox 3.6.x. I know the installation is fine because I had to reinstall Ubuntu and had the issue both times. Maybe it's something with my video driver?? No clue.

Revision history for this message
Ryan Cutter (ryancutter) said :
#5

I'm closing this question because I'm seeing this behavior (large portions of the screen covered by static) in apps other than Firefox (like Document Viewer). I'll look into it more but find changing the Display settings has an effect. I even get it in KDE.