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Print preview hangs on one wiki page

  • 8 replies
  • 4 have this problem
  • 26 views
  • Last reply by djeff68

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On this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_formats selecting Print Preview hangs FF. I'm running 20.0.1 on Win 7. Tried loading FF in Safe (addons disabled) Also hangs on my XP machine. Never saw a hang like this before and was using print preview on other wiki pages just before this page hangs. Hang every time I try PP on that one page.

On this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_formats selecting Print Preview hangs FF. I'm running 20.0.1 on Win 7. Tried loading FF in Safe (addons disabled) Also hangs on my XP machine. Never saw a hang like this before and was using print preview on other wiki pages just before this page hangs. Hang every time I try PP on that one page.

All Replies (8)

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Hello,

The Reset Firefox feature can fix many issues by restoring Firefox to its factory default state while saving your essential information. Note: This will cause you to lose any Extensions, Open websites, and some Preferences.

To Reset Firefox do the following:

  1. Go to Firefox > Help > Troubleshooting Information.
  2. Click the "Reset Firefox" button.
  3. Firefox will close and reset. After Firefox is done, it will show a window with the information that is imported. Click Finish.
  4. Firefox will open with all factory defaults applied.

Further information can be found in the Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings article.

Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!

Thank you.

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Not to be difficult, but before I take the chance to cause myself hours of trying to reconfigure back from reset, could someone try to reproduce? I count 3 mouse clicks to get to the problem.

1 - click -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_formats , 2 - click file, 3 - click print preview

On two machines it hangs every time. Maybe it is the page, but maybe FF could defend itself better.

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Yes, 35 minutes later, still not responding...

It's strange because Wikipedia generally has very simple print layouts. If I strip out the external stylesheets using the Web Console, the page previews almost immediately. To try that:

(1) Press Ctrl+Shift+k to open the Web Console.

(2) Next to the caret (>) paste the following line of script and press Enter:

while(document.querySelector('link[rel="stylesheet"]')){var s=document.querySelector('link[rel="stylesheet"]'); s.parentNode.removeChild(s);}

Of course, there's no way for a user to know in advance that this particular page will hang Firefox if you try to print it, and unfortunately I don't have the patience or tools to figure out why it's happening...

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An alternative is to disable the stylesheets, then you can easily enable them (s[i].disabled=false; or just toggle)

var s=document.querySelectorAll('link[rel="stylesheet"]');for(i=0;s[i];i++){s[i].disabled=!s[i].disabled;}

Modified by cor-el

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Thanks, guys, for confirming I'm not the only one who might see this problem. Is this something that should be listed as a bug for possible investigation in a future version of FF? Is there a formal way to report it?

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You can file a bug report here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

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Just to add a little more info...

The page is really too big to print well even if the css parsed ok.

I looked at one of the css files. It's one big text block with no human aids like line breaks. I ran one of the css files in verify at w3c and it gets over a hundred errors. I then ran a beautifier so I could look at it in a way that makes sense, which made it almost 2400 lines. A lot of the failures were from lines with "!ie" in them. I guess that's some kind of nonstandard kludge for Internet Explorer.

So a pretty ugly set of css for the browser to try to digest. Impressive that the display handles it as well as it does.

I'll try to file a bug as it would be nice if FF didn't hang.

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I'm having the same problem on wiki, mainly on music discography pages (not all, but some). The print started hanging up this month (May 2013). The last one that I tried with a problem was Hoobastank's Discography page on wiki. I tired this on a Win XP SP3 and Win 7 64 bit machine.