Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 435229
printing html page absurdly slow, produces huge garbage output
Last modified: 2008-06-17 13:55:05 EDT
Unzip the attached firefox-slow-printing.zip, which happens to be an Equifax credit report with all of the data obfuscated with garbage characters, and open obfuscated.html in firefox. Select File > Print... and tell it you want to print to a file. Here are the problems you will now notice: * It takes an absurdly long time, like over five minutes, to print the file. * The resulting output file is over 8MB, which is absurdly huge. * The resulting file is garbage -- all of the tables are drawn wrong, with overlapping text all over the place. * The print status pop-up stays on the screen forever until you mouse over it (or perhaps just give the firefox window focus or something, not sure exactly, but it certainly doesn't go away on its own if you aren't focused on the firefox window, which it should). I encountered all these problems with firefox-3.0-0.beta3.28.nightly20080226.fc9.i386. In contrast, with seamonkey-1.1.8-4.fc9.i386, it takes like 15 seconds to print, the resulting output file is less than 2MB, the printout is correct, and the print status pop-up goes away when printing is completed.
Created attachment 296152 [details] ZIP containing HTML file and associated images to demonstrate printing problem
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
Same problem here with Fedora 9 gold version - firefox-3.0-0.60.beta5.fc9.i386.
Here's one example: http://www.access-star.org/ITI-VPAT-v1.3.html Even if I completely remove the styling, it still produces 5MB PDF after 2 minutes of printing. I tried simplifying the HTML further, but then I figured that I don't know anything about the actual printing code, and what would possibly affect this behaviour. If you reduce the HTML to 1 paragraph, it works fine, even if you repeat that same paragraph 50 times, the end PDF stays under 50K.
I am not sure what to think about this. Yes, I can fully reproduce this -- when I print HTML in the attached zip file, it takes two minutes and PDF has 4,4MB. However, I am not that totally persuaded that it is not just the correct result of producing badly designed HTML on the Equifax page. Moreover, I am not sure whether it is problem of our Firefox (with new cairo etc.) or whether it is a problem of whole firefox (in which case it would be better to push this bug upstream). Will investigate.
I have filed this bug in the upstream database (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=439656) and believe that it is more appropriate to let it be resolved upstream. Red Hat will continue to track the issue in the centralized upstream bug tracker, and will review any bug fixes that become available for consideration in future updates. Thank you for the bug report.