Bug report: Zotero Standalone crashes when saving Factiva citations (in both FF and Chrome)

I am on a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro, mid 2014 running OS 10.10.1.

I am using Factiva with Firefox, Zotero Standalone. Factiva worked
fine with Zotero six months ago (and I don’t think Zotero has gotten
upgraded in 6 months), but for the last few weeks saving Zotero cites in Factiva crashes my browser -- my browser beachballs for 5
minutes or longer forcing me to quit.

I tried using Factiva / Zotero in Chrome with the same result.

To reproduce the bug:
>Go to Factiva and search for some articles (I was searching “decade of
innovation” / All Dates / Sources by Region > Asia)
>Then view an article in the search results. The zotero source type
icon should appear in the URL bar indicating a savable source
>Click that URL bar icon
>Watch as Zotero’s little status square appears in the bottom right
corner saying it is saving to a folder, but then it never indicates
saving the article itself and the beachball appears. When I go to
Activity Monitor, it tells me that Firefox is using 106% of my CPU.

I found a way to work around the crashes temporarily, but I ended up
getting crashes eventually anyways. The workaround was that when I
wanted to save an article that I was reading in Factiva’s sidebar and
search display, I clicked the “share” link on the article and got the
URL to share it with another Factiva account. I opened that URL in a
different window to just get the article without the factiva tools
around it. I was able to save three articles to Zotero that way but then
on the fourth save, I got the beachball again. Same 100%+ cpu usage.
  • Should be fixed now. Update your translators via Preferences -> General -> Update Now, refresh the page and try again.

    Thank you for reporting!
  • Fantastic! Thank you for doing this so quickly!
  • You know, I spoke too soon. On the factiva search results page, I get the folder icon in the URL bar that indicates Zotero has a list of sources to save. When I click more than one source to save down, I get the beachball of death again.
  • Can you provide the exact query you are using and the items you are trying to import? I'm not able to reproduce this.
  • edited April 2, 2015
    I'm having the same issue with Factiva, using Multilingual Zotero in Firefox 36, Windows 8.1 64-bit: Firefox hangs, with the spinning cursor, it's chewing up a lot of CPU, and its memory usage spikes from ~200 MB to over 1 GB.

    It only seems to happen with certain articles, and I haven't detected a pattern in which ones cause the issue. It happens whether the article is selected from the individual article page or from a list with the folder icon.

    One example that causes the crash for me: "Confucius offers antidote to the ills of China and the West, says Xi," Today (Singapore), 14 Feb 2014. This link may take you there, or try searching for the phrase "Confucius offers antidote" with the date filter off. It consistently hangs Firefox for me, whether from the article or from the folder icon.

    Also, I've tried to create a debug log but nothing is written to it before the hang.
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