Mozilla Firefox is one of the popular web browsers that is getting significant improvements with every update. It turns out that there’s a weird bug that can crash the browser and freeze the operating system.
The browser would crash or freeze only when a website has a file (a blob) that contains an extremely long name and prompt the user to download it every 1ms. This has the potential to crash the Firefox browser on Windows, Linux and Mac.
“What happens is that we generate a file (a blob) that contains an extremely long filename and prompt the user to download it every 1ms, therefore it flood the IPC channel between the child and main process, making the browser at the very least freeze,” the researcher explains.
On Windows, the Firefox bug will crash the browser’s process and sometimes freeze the operating system itself. If this ever happens on any Windows machine, the user would need to reboot the system.
It appears that the bug in Firefox can freeze Windows but it’s less alarming on Mac and Linux systems as it would only crash the browser and not the OS itself.
Similar issues with browsers that crashed were also experienced in the past and it’s not a big deal for most of the users. Recently, the researcher discovered a bug in the iPhone’s Safari that would crash the Apple’s smartphone. The entire platform would crash because of a CSS-based vulnerability.
Mozilla is yet to fix the bug and the company is already tracking the issue. It’s likely that the bug will be addressed in next release. We’re still waiting for more information from Mozilla and we’ll update the article should an update be offered.
In other news, Mozilla has recently released a new update to the Firefox browser that advances the browser version to 62.0.2 and the focus is on fixing bugs. Firefox 62.0.2 has fixed issues with the language packs and it doesn’t come with any new features but the changes are good enough to improve the overall experience.
