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Map sometimes freezes FireFox browser (Win 7) in use


Oelig

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I can't be sure it's the same thing, but for about a month, the map's been freezing for me, too. (Also FireFox (49.0.1) and Windows 7.) It happens a couple times a week. If I wait long enough, I get a report about a script on the web page that's "taking too long". I've seen a script from geocaching.com called something that made me think it had to do with the message center (I have the name somewhere, but not here...), although other times the script mentioned is some random google API script (as I recall). I don't know enough about web page scripting to understand whether that means anything.

 

If I tell FF to stop the script, I get control back, although usually (but not always) the map isn't useful after that, so I have to reload it.

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I'm glad to know that I am not the only one experiencing this. I am having to restart Firefox daily because of the scripting problem - and this has been going on for weeks (I kept thinking it will get fixed.) I would think that this is a problem that is easy to replicate in development.

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The text of the message I get when the script hangs is

 

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue.

Script: https://www.geocaching.com/acc…essage-center-header-widget.js:54

Script: https://ajax.googleapis.com/aj…ibs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js:3

with the two different scripts reported in two different messages on two different days.

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We are also having this problem.

 

Two different Win 10, anniversary update PC's and Firefox 49.0.2.

 

The freezes seem to come more often when there are multiple geocaching map tabs open or multiple tabs on multiple browser windows.

 

We usually use the leaflet map setting with Open Street Map default but it also happens with Google maps.

 

My latest error is:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue.

Script: https://www.geocaching.com/acc…essage-center-header-widget.js:54

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message-center-header-widget.js, line 54:

 

if (pollClock < UserModel.idleDurationSeconds) {

 

This is where it hangs. Not going to analyze what it does and why it freezes, GS should. But it is a script that takes care of the Message Center icon in the header. Map itself creates tons of connections when downloading the map tiles. Map center widget adds to it with its periodic connection refreshing the MC status so we know whether we have a new message. And for unknown reason it just sometimes... freezes.

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I've been having the same problem with Windows 10. Now I cannot access the map at all - the page comes up blank with my found logs total from about 3 months ago!

 

Should have said - using Firefox. However, have just tried to access map via Microsoft Edge and all works properly with correct logged cache total!

Edited by graham&linda
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Actually, it looks like the whole website is having a freeeze problem.

When I let a cache page open for the night (or any long period of time > "idleDurationSeconds"), I can't acces it anymore the next day. Even a page (hard or not) refresh doesn't help. I have to close the browser tab.

 

I'm no JavaScript expert, but hopefully GS's dev team features at least one... That bug is really annoying, please fix it quickly !

If I happened to have a bug in production, I'm pretty sure my boss wouldn't let me go home before it's been fixed. And after that, he would probably ask me why it hadn't been noticed in staging...

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I thought it's a problem with my computer, happy to see that it's not.

 

Using Chrome on Ubuntu I also have these freezes for several weeks. They occur on the map page, on "cache-listing"-pages and on the "log you visit"-page, if they stay open for a couple of minutes. The latter could be really annoying, if you've written a lengthily log and habe to close the tab (in Chrome each tab runs its own process so it's not the whole browser-session that crashes).

 

Edit:

The bug just appeared on the "Your Profile"-Page, unfortunately development tools of Chrome don't show any content if they're started after a crash. So I'll try to open them directly and try to catch the problem.

 

Edit2:

This is strange: after the last crash I reopened the page, now with development tools activated. The error haven't occurred on this tab since more than two hours now, but it occurred on another tab where I haven't activated development tools before :rolleyes: .

 

Edit3:

Yesss, the tab with activated development tools crashed after a little bit more than 3 hours :-)

 

Unfortunately the development tools refuse to work on the crashed tab, even if they had been activated before :-(

 

As I have no idea how to investigate further on this error, GS should not have any problems as it could be reproduced easily and reliable.

Edited by Cachologen
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Seeing that the freeze still hadn't been fixed yed, I thought I'd check what was being said in this thread. Well... nothing new actually. I may not be the only one to wonder, but let me ask, just to know :

 

Does anybody from Groundspeak even read what is being written in this forum (especially the "Bug Reports and Feature Discussions") ?

Is it really useful that we inform you when there's a bug ?

Do you care when some customers are complaining ?

If not, you could as well close this forum section, can't you ?

 

It's worrying that after 2 weeks, nobody even bothered to give us any update. While trying to figure out such a problem may not be trivial, communicating about your actions and plans should be fairly easy. So could you please tell us ?

Is a bug fix even planned ?

When can we expect it to be in production ?

 

Thank you for your understanding.

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Does anybody from Groundspeak even read what is being written in this forum (especially the "Bug Reports and Feature Discussions") ?

Yes, but they don't always reply to the thread.

 

I thought it's a problem with my computer, happy to see that it's not.

 

hi Sarah and Christoph, long time no see!

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It's worrying that after 2 weeks, nobody even bothered to give us any update.

Groundspeak rarely comments on bug reports, or nearly any discussion for that matter these days. They feel that doing so leads to "unrealistic expectations".

 

It should also be noted that this problem only seems to be affecting a handful of people. I run the same setup as the OP (FF on Win7), but the map has never freezed for me. For that matter, I can't recall any page on this website ever freezing for me. If this was affecting a significant number of people, I would expect a lot more posts about it here.

 

Keep in mind that the folks at Geocaching HQ only have so much time to work on things and have to prioritize their work, so a problem that's affecting a relatively small number of users may not be worked on immediately.

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So we have Firefox on Windows and Linux, Chrome. What could be common? Some network issue?

 

For me, it started about two months ago, when there were some other issues with loading geocaching.com pages. These issues are fixed now, but freezing still happens from this time. Sometime I can browse caches one hour, sometime only several minutes till it freeze. I though it will be fixed soon, but was not. So I searched web and found this topic. Maybe I could try blocking of "message-center-header-widget.js" script.

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More than 2 months now and nobody seems to care. Poor poor communication...

By the way, the freeze problem seems to have gotten even worse the last days. I don't expect anything positive to happen anymore, so I'll live with that. Luckily, this is the only site I regularly visit where I have to kill all my tabs after a while :cry:

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It should also be noted that this problem only seems to be affecting a handful of people. I run the same setup as the OP (FF on Win7), but the map has never freezed for me. For that matter, I can't recall any page on this website ever freezing for me. If this was affecting a significant number of people, I would expect a lot more posts about it here.

 

How often do you leave a browser tab with the cache map open for hours or even days?

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It should also be noted that this problem only seems to be affecting a handful of people. I run the same setup as the OP (FF on Win7), but the map has never freezed for me. For that matter, I can't recall any page on this website ever freezing for me. If this was affecting a significant number of people, I would expect a lot more posts about it here.

 

Keep in mind that the folks at Geocaching HQ only have so much time to work on things and have to prioritize their work, so a problem that's affecting a relatively small number of users may not be worked on immediately.

 

Maybe this problem is not affecting just a handful of people, it could be that some people don't tell in public that they have these problems.

 

Yesterday I was on an event where we discussed the new changes on geocaching.com. Then I mentioned the freezing problem and everyone agreed to have the same problem. As the group consisted only of three people this information isn't appropriate for statistic evaluation, but it could be a hint that some people don't even complain about this error.

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It should also be noted that this problem only seems to be affecting a handful of people. I run the same setup as the OP (FF on Win7), but the map has never freezed for me. For that matter, I can't recall any page on this website ever freezing for me. If this was affecting a significant number of people, I would expect a lot more posts about it here.

 

I should add my voice to the handful then, as I've been suffering from the freezing map for many weeks (months?) now. It mostly happens when I'm panning or zooming in and out. A refresh generally fixes it, but sometimes the browser (IE or Firefox) locks up solid.

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It should also be noted that this problem only seems to be affecting a handful of people. I run the same setup as the OP (FF on Win7), but the map has never freezed for me. For that matter, I can't recall any page on this website ever freezing for me. If this was affecting a significant number of people, I would expect a lot more posts about it here.

 

How often do you leave a browser tab with the cache map open for hours or even days?

 

Every single day of my life ;) Seriously: The map page is my default page in the browser so it always opens automatically. This works both at home AND at work :) And yes, it is STILL freezing. The new map design for some reason made it slightly better I would say. It allows me to work longer but after some time the browser still get unresponsive.

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Happens to me too, using Firefox. It's been happening for weeks/months. I've been making a conscious effort not to leave any geocaching.com windows open, either individual cache pages or the browsing/search maps. It's a bit of irritating, but just hoping that Groundspeak will make whatever changes are necessary to avoid this from continuing indefinitely.

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Due to the error messages I suspect that the problem could be the polling message center widget on the top corner. It seems to crash sometimes the browser when clicking a page where it is loaded. To prevent the widget running on background I made a Firefox add-on which modifies it to run only once when the page is loaded.

 

You can install it from here

Worked well for a while but now your add-on doesn't install anymore on Firefox 43+.

 

Caution: This add-on has not been reviewed by Mozilla and can't be installed on release versions of Firefox 43 and above.

Edited by Rhodo Dendron
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I'm using the Chrome Extension from arisoft for six days now and no freeze occured although some tabs stood open for several hours.

 

If I noticed it correctly - haven't tested it in detail - with the Extension active the Message Center doesn't inform about a new message that arrives in the background (one has to refresh the page to see the "new message"-marker). But even if this is true it's not a problem for me, as I use the Message Center only via E-Mail.

 

Thanks to arisoft for this useful fix.

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Arisoft: something wrong went in the review process for Firefox? It's been already 13 days.

 

Not at all! It is on the right track. Queue Position: 199 of 319 (It was about 300 at the beginning) Reviewing extensions is not like reviewing geocaches. It is much slower. Additional questions have not yet been asked. :rolleyes:

 

Anyway... if you know what you are doing, you can review the extension by yourself. It happens to be plain javascript in a zip file.

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Oh, I never thought it could be that slow. :)

 

You know, I wanted to install the extension from the FF repository due to the auto-update function (in case you would update it in the future). But I would have to wait another month for the review so I have just installed the add-on from your site. Yep, I glimpsed inside ;) (did not know before that the XPI is actually a ZIP file) and everything looked OK. :)

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Great community here, thanks for the Add-on. Excellent job!

 

However, how do we make Groundspeak eventually fix the bug in their scripts? With Firefox' new multi-threading architecture (Electrolysis), Groundspeak's javascript code basically crashes Firefox. Just have one GC.com tab sitting in the background. Boom! It's no longer enough to close the GC.com tab, because Firefox still keeps processing the broken Javascript code. Everything is lost, all tabs, you have to kill Firefox. :-(

 

It's also disappointing when writing a long online-log for a found geocache, and then Firefox crashes and all text is lost. Happens so often. *sigh*

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However, how do we make Groundspeak eventually fix the bug in their scripts?

 

I can not say wether the bug is in Firefox or in the javascript code. It is kind of mystery to me. My simple solution is to just get rid of unnecessary code to avoid the bug anyway.

 

It's also disappointing when writing a long online-log for a found geocache, and then Firefox crashes and all text is lost. Happens so often. *sigh*

 

My friend took a photograph of the screen, when it happened to him. Perhaps the Print Screen button with OCR tool could save the log while you are waiting the fix. :huh:

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Everything is lost, all tabs, you have to kill Firefox. :-(

 

It's also disappointing when writing a long online-log for a found geocache, and then Firefox crashes and all text is lost. Happens so often. *sigh*

 

Normally killing Firefox and restarting it should allow you to restore the tabs (and thus also the log in process).

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I can not say wether the bug is in Firefox or in the javascript code. It is kind of mystery to me. My simple solution is to just get rid of unnecessary code to avoid the bug anyway.

 

On my PC, when it happens, it not only freezes the selected tab but also one CPU core goes up to 100% load and stays there until I close that tab (non-multi-threaded) or Firefox (multi-threaded). Maybe some kind of endless loop or wrongly programmed recursion. Just guessing, I'm not a javascript programmer.

 

Unfortunately, my first approach was to blacklist https://www.geocaching.com/account/scripts/custom/message-center-header-widget.js with AdBlockPlus but this makes the whole website unusable. For example, on geocache pages, logs are not loaded any longer, and also the mini-map preview won't work, and coordinates cannot be changed any longer. In other words, not loading message-center-header-widget.js at all seems to break most (all?) other javascript code on that page.

 

My friend took a photograph of the screen, when it happened to him. Perhaps the Print Screen button with OCR tool could save the log while you are waiting the fix. :huh:

 

Taking a photograph, really cool idea. Have to remember that! But I'm using your add-on now, so hopefully I won't have any more crashes. :-) Again, thank you so much!

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