Crashing Firefox 3.0

I found a Web page from a major magazine that crashes Firefox 3.0 repeatedly. I doubt that the page is malicious, instead there's probably a nasty bug in the browser. Does this page crash your browser?

ITPro Today

July 30, 2008

1 Min Read
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While surfing the net reading news I came across a page at a Network World that crashes Firefox 3.0 on a 64-bit Ubuntu Linux system (a test platform not regularly used for day to day surfing).

The browser ID is as follows:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061017 Firefox/3.0

The page in question is __http [colon slash://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/073008-dns-attack-writer-a-victim.html__ and I tested it 3 times to make sure that it wasn't some sort of fluke. The browser crashed each time.

Does visiting that page crash your installation of Firefox?

Anyway, after checking I noticed that the system didn't have Firefox 3.0.1 installed, so I did a quick upgrade and revisited that page. This time the browser didn't crash. This particular system is rebuild from scratch about every 2 days, so I'll have to modify the setup script to make sure all packages are up to date.

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