Palemoon crashes on Bing.com

[Gor32]

Recently I had where PM will crash when I try to search using Bing.com unless I restart it in safemode. I have all ext/addons disabled. It appears the only thing going safemode does is disable the default profile (29.4.4). Then it works and I can search. My other browsers work fine, its just PM that causes problems.
Any suggestions? I love PM, but if I have to delete everything I may just end up using another browser instead. Trying to do captchas on PM seems hit or miss already.

[Moonchild]

IMPORTANT: Information to include when asking for support

[Gor32]

Operating system: Win10 pro
Browser version: 21h2
32-bit or 64-bit?: 64bit
Problem URL: www.bing.com
Theme: default 29.4.4
Installed add-ons: ABPrime 3.1.7770, Expose Noisy Tabs 1.1.1, S3 Google Translator 5.35, Toggle JavaScript 1.2.2.010 -- All disabled.
Installed plugins: (about:plugins) Adobe Acrobat 21.11.20039.0, VLC Web plugin 3.0.3.0 -- All disabled.

[Moonchild]

IMPORTANT: Information to include when asking for support

[van p]

I can confirm this. When I do a search, the browser closes and I get a message from one of my security products:

Screenshot 2022-01-29 190743.png (8.1 KiB) Viewed 3206 times

I'm supposed to receive this fly-out display when I open some applications, including Pale Moon. What the heading means though, I have no idea. Pale Moon even crashed when I opened a new tab, went to www.bing.com, and did nothing but close that tab; a few seconds later Pale Moon crashed.

I have no meaningful extensions, etc. I'm not asking for support, just adding info, so I won't be including console data, etc. If it means anything, nothing like this happens when I use Qwant, which relies primarily on Bing.

[moonbat]

So configure your HitmanPro to not interfere with Pale Moon and contact the creators of that product if you want to know how to do that.

[van p]

So configure your HitmanPro to not interfere with Pale Moon and contact the creators of that product if you want to know how to do that.

The issue isn't HitmanPro.Alert; I've been using that and Pale Moon for years. But apparently there's something going on here HPA doesn't like/understand, although this situation isn't listed as an official 'alert' on the HPA control panel. I don't need to contact HPA; I'm not complaining about it, as I said, just adding a little more info to the picture.

I also tested Bing with UR browser, a Chrome variant--no problem at all.

[moonbat]

Since at this point nothing else is known, try to whitelist Pale Moon in HPA. If the problem persists then you know it's probably something else.

[Moonchild]

@Gor32 - are you also using Hitman Pro?

The issue isn't HitmanPro.Alert

An how, pray tell, can you say this with such conviction? Any program that hooks into Pale Moon is by definition a potential point of failure. Have you analysed what exactly it does? have you analysed all interactions with Pale Moon code? Did you conclude this by testing all affected routines in Pale Moon that are interfered with?

Thousands of people use Bing daily on Pale Moon. I can't reproduce the problem myself, either, so the more compelling evidence points to that the issue -is- Hitman Pro, so the first thing you'd want to do is try to eliminate it as a point of failure by excluding it from your run-time environment in Pale Moon (i.e. exclude as moonbat suggested). Troubleshooting 101 there.
Also, if you want me to be able to analyse anything with a reproducible crash, at least show a crash report or even better provide a crash dump so i can see the call stack (or use the symbols to debug yourself if you feel you are able to)

[Moonchild]

I've tried to reproduce in several environments and was actually able to get it to crash, too. It seems very much timing-dependent and intermittent (which might explain why running in safe mode and/or having external stuff hooked into the browser makes a difference). The main issue seems to be the bing.com home page itself which is extremely script-heavy and does a lot of js module juggling (not exactly a good choice for a search page IMHO).
I'm looking into this as best I can. specific crash reports, troubleshooting information etc and exact steps to reproduce would still be extremely helpful.

[Moonchild]

As a temporary workaround, you can set dom.moduleScripts.enabled to false in about:config, or not use the bing.com search home page but instead using the search box set to Bing. Please note that a fair number of websites these days rely on JS module scripts to function properly so you would be sacrificing web compatibility with a number of sites to avoid this crash on Bing's home page.
It would also help to make a report to Microsoft that a recent change is causing this problem in your preferred browser.

[jarman]

The shortest "clean" way I could find for both the latest Pale Moon and Basilisk (Windows 7 x64) is to start with an empty profile, dismiss the first startup prompts, open a new tab, type in bing.com, and click the Reload button once the page has fully loaded for the first time. This reload crash actually happens with any profile, although it sometimes takes more than one reload.

[Moonchild]

Like I said it's intermittent and timing-dependent. As far as I can tell it's caused by rapid loading/unloading of JS modules -- the same thing seems to be causing performance issues on the same page (high CPU).

[van p]

The OP didn't mention HitmanPro and hasn't yet answered Moonchild's question. Again, I'm not asking for support, just trying to add to the evidence. Also, I don't use Bing (directly) and don't have a dog in the fight of whether it works in Pale Moon or not.

[Moonchild]

The OP didn't mention HitmanPro and hasn't yet answered Moonchild's question. Again, I'm not asking for support, just trying to add to the evidence. Also, I don't use Bing (directly) and don't have a dog in the fight of whether it works in Pale Moon or not.

This isn't really relevant any more at this point. HMP clearly isn;t the issue but it being intermittent makes it difficult to reproduce/track.

[Gor32]

So I do not have Hitman.
My PC stays running just fine, only PM closes unexpectedly when on Bing.com.

I used Appcrasshview (normal user and admin) and got no results, even after PM closed/crashed.

[Moonchild]

So you're getting a crash-to-desktop. OK; not really helpful but I think I have a fix for it that i'll have in the next major release. At least I've not been able to crash it again after applying it. Not something you can do though as it's a code change.

[Kris_88]

PM sometimes hangs and starts eating memory after opening/closing several Bing tabs. I was lucky to repeat the situation 2 times. It looks like the old problem concerning mutation observers. But I do not have time to explore more accurately...

[Kris_88]

Not responding.
Tested in 29.4.3, 29.4.4.

[Moonchild]

Please don't mix reports. A hang is not a crash.