I just encountered a Firefox lockup. I diagnosed the running processes and found the Java virtual machine was waiting forever on a "futex" semaphore with no available thread to wake it up. The main Firefox process was waiting in I/O poll for a response from the JVM. I was able to simulate a semaphore post and the JVM woke up and Firefox became active again. There are programming errors in both. I started a 2nd Firefox process (not a 2nd window ... this is a real separate process) and logged in to ECN from the 2nd one after disabling Java. The 2nd Firefox is running faster than the 1st Firefox for things like windowing exposes (it's not doing any server accesses, just redisplaying graphical bits). Firefox is basically not handling Java very well.
So what in ECN uses Java besides the chatroom? Everything else seems to be working OK with the Firefox that has Java disabled.
