[andreas_g]

Dear OmniWeb community!

I recently switched from OmniWeb 5.10.3 to the latest 5.11 sneaky peek (build 148080). I have a serious crashing problem with the new version of OW.

I have not been able to connect the crashes with a special situation. They seem to happen almost randomly and spontaneous while loading some web page. Loading the same page again does not reproduce the crash.

It happened loading google.com, or just loading a linked image (no html, just a plain jpeg image) and on many other pages. So i think this may have something to do with OmniWeb itself, rather than the WebKit engine.

Is anyone else experiencing this sort of crashes? Should i send the crash reports for these kind of crashes? I can't add helpful informations about the situation in which the crash occured to the crash report because i can't find a reason and can't reproduce the crash.

I'm using an iMac (late 2009) with Mac OS X v10.6.7 and no special internet plugins. Besides the OW problem the machine is absolutely stable.

Thanks in advance for every helpful idea!

Andreas

[whpalmer4]

You should always send the crash reports, even if you can't describe what you think might have triggered the crash.

Do you have a lot of windows and tabs open? With a sufficient quantity, you could exhaust OmniWeb's address space and cause crashes without any particular pattern, though in my experience you usually get a spinning beach ball for a little while before the crash.

[andreas_g]

Thanks for the fast response!

I do not have many tabs or windows open. The crash also happens with only one window and one tab open after a very short periode of usage.

I will send all reports of the crashes from now on.

[whpalmer4]

Okay, sounds like it isn't likely to be the memory space exhaustion issue, which is too bad, because that has an easy fix — don't do that :-)

Sometimes a stack trace (such as the crash report provides) will pin the failure down to a point in the code where it is possible to diagnose and fix the issue without reproducing it.

If the problem occurs frequently (so that after a certain period of time going by without a crash, you can be confident that it isn't going to happen), you can try creating another user account on your Mac, don't copy over any preferences, plug-ins, etc. and use it there for a while. If the crashes don't happen, then you know it is something about your environment in the original account, and can try moving things over one at a time to see what causes them to start again.

[andreas_g]

Am i really the only one experiencing these crashes? The bug persists in the final release of OmniWeb 5.11

[whpalmer4]

I only have the memory exhaustion crashes. Did you try my suggested experiment?

[Brian]

Andreas, it may be that the sites you tend to browse provoke a crash in a way that other sites don't. If you're able to detect any pattern in when the crashes happen vs. when they don't, letting the support folks know would help them help you, as well.

[andreas_g]

It seems the problem is finally solved!

I did contact the OmniGroup support and told them all the details i was able to find out in the past month. They responded very quickly to my e-mail and found the solution on the first try!

It seems the crashes occurred due to a font problem. Like the support team told me, i did check my fonts using Font Book.app and found some duplicate fonts. I removed the duplicate fonts from my users's font directory (~/Library/Fonts) --> no more crashes!

Thanks to everyone for the great help and support!
It's again a pleasure using OmniWeb!

[sarasdad]

I had the same problem, but there were no duplicate fonts. OW support suggested that an Arial font in ~/Library/Fonts/ might be the problem. Moving the font out of that library to the system library (/Library/Fonts/) did the trick--no more crashes.

[andreas_g]

One of the duplicate fonts i did remove from my user's font directory was indeed Arial. Maybe finally that was the cause for the crashes rather than the fact some fonts were duplicates. But that's just a guess.