Firefox 3 Beta 4 crashes on Google Pack website
By Jonathan Schlaffer
I know it may seem like that I’m picking on Google these days but the blame does not necessarily lie there. The redirect issues mentioned the other day were actually a problem with the OpenDNS service and now it seems, Firefox has no love for Google products.
Perhaps it’s just a problem with the Beta; perhaps it’s a problem with Vista but whatever it is, someone had better sort it out. When accessing the Google Pack website, Firefox 3 Beta 4 crashed and a pop-up notification from Vista said the program had been shut down due to (DEP) “Data Execution Prevention.”
The DEP feature is hardware supported by most modern processors and is widely used in Windows XP SP2 and later. It is designed to, “prevent an application or service from executing code from a non-executable memory region.”
The Google Pack website likes to scan your system for installed features and then offer to install the ones that you don’t have installed. This is a possible reason as to why Vista thought something was going wrong with the program.
Unfortunately, DEP cannot be disabled for Firefox under Windows Vista so the problem will remain until Firefox fixes the issue. And I do dearly hope it is a problem with Firefox and not with Vista itself but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
There are no problems like this when accessing the Google Pack site in Internet Explorer. I suppose I can live with this minor shortcoming for now; that’s not to say there may be other sites that cause this same problem but the issue can be replicated across the board with Firefox 3 Beta 4 and the Google Pack site.
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Entry was posted
on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
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Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
Stumble It!
March 14th, 2008
I’ve tried this several times on two different Vista installations with old and new profiles using Beta 4 and the latest nightly build and I’m not seeing any problems. Do you have an extension installed that might be causing this?
- A
March 15th, 2008
I too tired it on several Vista installations and was able to replicate it without failure. Both with the extensions enabled and in Firefox safe mode. Perhaps it is a problem with Vista itself, some area of my configuration could be cause the problem. There are just no guarantees when it comes to these things.
Asa, I was able to replicate it without fail so I thought it was just a general problem but now you report it’s not. The world of computers is a mysterious one.
I’m still inclined to think that there is a problem with my version of Firefox somewhere, maybe a corrupt configuration file… but ALL of them?
March 17th, 2008
I’m having the same problems with another website. It actually just started happening today, which is strange because I haven’t changed any firefox settings today. It’s a real annoyance and I’m hoping it will get resolved asap.
March 20th, 2008
Hi,
i don’t think its a DEP Problem, i think its more a Problem with a Plugin.
I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424158 for this.
- Tomcat
March 27th, 2008
I would like to share with you the happy, I was admitted to Harvard University this year, we bless me!