Very unfriendly Netsurf error message

I’ve just booted up my PandaRo only for it to stop with this very unfriendly error message from Netsurf:

Memory exhausted while loading URL file

Oh sure, I can just press Continue and the machine boots up – but without a browser I can’t use the internet and without Netsurf running I can’t do anything about its exhausted memory while loading a URL file.

There are many megabytes of free RAM, gigabytes of free disk space, and nothing big in !Scrap or !Cache.

Fortunately, an old version of Netsurf starts up just fine, so I can come here and ask you guys for help.

There are two things you need to do:

1) Report it as a bug using the standard Netsurf bug tracker.

2) Mention it on the Netsurf users mailing list, to see if anyone else has seen it or can reproduce it.

Links: Netsurf bug tracker and
Netsurf users mailing list via mailto:netsurf-users@netsurf-browser.org

I was pointed here as a possibly interesting bug had been reported.

Please, pretty please, if you have a bug can you report it in our bugtracker at http://bugs.netsurf-browser.org/mantis it is really easy to do and it makes us infinitely more likely for us to be able to address the issue.

Fixing bugs that are reported is possible, fixing bugs we know nothing about is not.

In this case the issue appears to be a result of the url database (keeps track of visited pages so links are coloured and history kept) cannot be read properly.

Unfortunately a great deal of the older code in NetSurf reports any and all errors as “out of memory”.

The team has been working very hard to improve this and in current CI builds a fatal error will not occur.

I am very interested in obtaining a copy of the “broken” url database though so i can write a test for it and fix any issues. But please can this be done through the bug tracker.

My time available for NetSurf is limited and I can either spend it doing one of the innumerable exiting tasks or reading various forums on the off chance I might spot a bug report.

In short if you want NetSurf to get better help us to help you!