Comment 132 for bug 226470

Note: This is using Epiphany rather than Firefox, but the symptoms are the same.

I have definitely confirmed that the NY Times home page (www.nytimes.com) can trigger this error. I was doing other work and this morning a minimized window sitting on the NY Times home page sprang an "untitled" window with a refreshed home page. The log file contained the typical "Gdk-WARNING **: GdkWindow 0x2123dc0 unexpectedly destroyed" followed by 6 Gdk-CRITICAL/GLib-GObject-CRITICAL warnings.

I tried to save the "Untitled Window" and that did not work. Going back to the original window and executing a "save" did work, but the "Save" window failed to exit properly (I think the entire browser window set was effectively hung). Trying to minimize the now dysfunctional "save" pop-up window seemed to result in: "Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_window_hide: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW (window)' failed" (followed by 3 Gtk-CRITICAL/GLib-GObject-CRITICAL) warnings (similar to those when the "Untitled WIndow" first appears.

Killing original NY Times home page window (clicking on the window X) deleted the original window, the untitled window and the save pop-up window (at least there is a work-around). Of course its a bad work around if you have other useful tabs in the same window as the one causing the problem (though I believe killing the dysfunctional tab might have worked).

Now, I've looked at the homepage window and it does not have a:
  meta http-equiv="refresh"
command to refresh the window using HTML. Given that I don't think I've seen the error occur when I have Javascript disabled, I think the NY Times is using a javascript window refresh timeout.

It is worth noting that I think you could reproduce the bug (at least on a 32 bit single core CPU) if one simply copied down a number of pages (newspaper or TV station "homepages" might be a good bet) and hacked them to contain a line like
   <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1">
The problem is the getting the full impact of loading a time-consuming network bandwidth limited page. This probably requires something like:
    content="1;url=http://www.nytimes.com/"
    content="1;url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/"
     etc.
Then the problem is how to get it to repeat itself. It might require one master reloading file which sets up multiple foreign-site reloads.

But I think if you do something like this and max out either the CPU or the network bandwidth you should eventually get to the point where the bug becomes reproducible.

It is also useful to note that the NY Times home page includes the lines:
   <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0">
   <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
which I believe function to prevent caching of the page contents. Generally speaking if you have a fast network connection the pages one is loading should probably contain such lines. If on the other hand you max out your network bandwidth before you max out your CPU (or memory) one may want to try loading pages which are more static and can be cached (to reduce the network load).