On 06/28/2017 10:15 PM, Dick Steffens wrote:
> This afternoon I had occasion to visit three YouTube pages:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5PJ0JZUhgc
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIVa_nkU0j4
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dBGnUSrjQo
>
> The first two are old Disney cartoons, and the third is a collection of
> German Shepherd videos that I got to by following click bait from a news
> site. Later in the afternoon Firefox was very slow to respond, and then
> other programs were affected -- ran slowly, too. I'm guessing one of
> these links caused the problem. I looked at top and saw Firefox spending
> a lot of time near the top. Somewhere else I saw that Firefox was
> looking at a YouTube site. I don't remember what tool showed that to me
> and, sadly, I didn't write down which site was referenced. I assume
> there's a log somewhere I could look at to find out which one, but
> that's currently outside my skill set. The thing is, I had closed the
> Firefox tabs with those things on them, and left Firefox on about:blank.
> So, Firefox should not have been running near the top in top. I tried
> closing Firefox, but it wouldn't respond to the mouse click. At that
> point I ran ps ax | grep firefox, found the process number, and killed
> it. After a couple of seconds it closed. I've been out for the evening
> and have restarted Firefox. It appears to be running normally now.
>
> The important question is, how does a website take so much control of
> Firefox, and do I need to be looking for any other bad side effects?
>
>
This is an old issue that pops up in Web 2.0-ish winky blink sites with
lots of java/flash/javascript and the occasional memory leak Often a
bit of FF stays in memory and gets lost and you'll just have to kill it
with extreme prejudice. FF can and will suck up memory and CPU cycles.
If you linked in from another site to youtube, I doubt there was a
nefarious payload - Google would not want the bad press. The issue most
likely was either flash, or some other site heap full of javascript
embedded advertisements.
-Ed
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