New York Times Fonts Again?
Starting yesterday, I have not been able to access the New York Times home page with TenFourFox 38.6.0 and OSx 10.4.11. Within a couple of seconds of beginning to load the page, the spinning color wheel appears and never goes away and the entire computer is locked up, i.e. I am unable even to switch to another application or the Finder. I have to force quit TenFourFox or force a shutdown to get out of it.
A couple of days ago I started getting more frequent "Bad Font Detected" boxes on the nytimes.com homepage but now it doesn't even get that far, so I do not know which fonts might be causing the problem, if indeed that is what is causing this total lockup.
All I can do now is avoid nytimes.com.
Many thanks.
Iain
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Support Staff 1 Posted by Chris (chtrusch... on 10 Feb, 2016 03:55 PM
Confirmed on 10.5. The browser doesn't recover from the spinning beachball, with RAM usage steadily increasing. It went up to 1.5 GB within a few minutes and then crashed. It doesn't seem to be downloadable fonts. Still locks up with ion and/or baseline disabled, but I didn't wait for it to crash here. Doesn't lock up with JS disabled completely, but then website functionality is reduced. Safari 5 works ok.
Support Staff 2 Posted by Chris (chtrusch... on 10 Feb, 2016 04:19 PM
The offending script is likely to be hosted at http://graphics8.nytimes.com. If I disable JS for this subdomain only the site loads fine.
That said, some headings on the site are displayed as boxed As, fallback works only if downloadable fonts are disabled.
3 Posted by Iain Harris on 10 Feb, 2016 05:59 PM
I can confirm that the nytimes.com site loads without crashing TenFourFox if javascript is disabled. But I do not know how to disable javascript for a single subdomain so I have not tested that.
4 Posted by Iain Harris on 10 Feb, 2016 06:39 PM
I just tried turning off javascript for the http://graphics8.nytimes.com/ domain only, using YesScript, and that did solve the problem.
Thanks for that!
Support Staff 5 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 12 Feb, 2016 12:45 AM
I've finally analyzed this issue, and it does appear to simply be another font that needs to be blacklisted (more accurately it's the same font, but the NYT moved them to a different URL, and we have to use a URL-based block for this because it does not have a proper PostScript name). The reason blocking the script works is because it creates a DOM node that loads the offending font. With the blacklist fixed, I am no longer able to reproduce this issue.
The updated blacklist is scheduled for 38.6.1, which is an imminent update to fix an urgent Firefox security issue.
Support Staff 6 Posted by Chris (chtrusch... on 12 Feb, 2016 07:50 AM
I'm not sure. When I tested it, the problem persisted even with downloadable fonts disabled. Today I'm unable to reproduce it with 38.6.0 in the first place (fresh profile, downloadable fonts enabled, no blockings). I guess nytimes.com must have changed something. Either way it's fixed.