Question

Can anyone help me figure out why this page causes Android browsers to crash?

http://thewellcommunity.org

All sub-pages seem to work just fine, but when I load the home page on an Android, the browser app just closes without any warning or error messages. I’ve tried this on 3 Android phones and on a Kindle Fire.

When I completely disable JavaScript in the browser on the phone, the page loads successfully. Unfortunately this is a live website, so I’d prefer to save disabling chunks of JavaScript on the server side as a last resort.

On a side note, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile and Firefox on an Android phone do not crash, but Dolphin, Miren and the stock browser do.

UPDATE: It appears that I spoke too soon when I said this was fixed. I was able to reduce how often the browser crashes, but it still does occasionally crash when the page is loaded. 🙁

UPDATE #2: It now appears that the crash may be CSS related. After spending weeks enabling and disabling various JavaScript snippits, I tried disabling the stylesheet, and now I can’t get it to crash.

Anyone know of an Android CSS bug that might be causing this? My guess is that it’s related to some CSS that only gets accessed after the JavaScript does it’s work.

Answer 1

I found the culprit… It appears that a css font-family rule was to blame. Although, I’m not sure why since the same font stack is used several other places on the site. :\

Here’s the line that caused the problem…

.Site-Search .Buttons input 
{
    ...
    font-family: TeXGyreHerosRegular, Arial, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;
    ...
}

For whatever reason that line caused all stock Android browsers to crash. Weird.