1E
White dragons are not only the weakest of the chromatic dragons but the weakest of dragons overall. A step down from the black dragons, while they do have much thicker hides and stronger jaws, 1E white dragons have about the same ability to sustain physical injury as a tiger. In fact, their claws do less damage than a tiger's do, so it's possible that their legs are actually less muscular (or the claws are blunter, or smaller, which seems unlikely).
The wings of a white dragon are only approximately bat-like. The wings are formed from all five digits, with a claw-like spur projecting from the 'wrist', and resembling a sixth digit. More significantly, a bony or cartilaginous spur projects from the elbow, supporting the wing membrane (technically, the plagiopatagium). Furthermore, the membrane does not reach the side of the body, with some further stiffening structure supporting the medial edge to give it a scalloped appearance.
The head is comparatively smooth-skinned, at least so far as we can see, and has a narrow, pointed jaw with greatly enlarged incisor teeth. The dragon has large eyes, raised above the rostrum, but, as with most other dragons, probably not facing forward enough to give it binocular vision. The most distinctive feature, however, is the head crest, formed from a spine arising from the back of the skull. This is likely the same anatomical structure as the dorsal crest of black and green dragons, but here restricted only to the head. As with those crests, it seems likely to be used in communicating with others of its kind - perhaps it can be raised to signal aggression. (Or, heck, willingness to mate... who knows?)Apart from being only about as tough as a tiger, the white dragon comes bottom of the ranking in other respects, too. It's the least intelligent dragon, on a par with orcs, and only rarely capable of any kind of speech at all. It also spends most of its time asleep, with its time budget being roughly 14 hours sleeping, 8 hours hunting, 2 hours active in its lair. Which makes sense given the likely difficulty it will have finding food.
In 2E, the white dragon's body is covered in ring-like bands of armoured scales, extending all the way down to the tip of the tail. The wings are more typically bat-like, still with the five extended digits and the carpal claw, but without the other structural oddities, and seemingly attached to the body at the sides. The head is proportionately shorter, without the narrow snout, and the eyes are also much smaller, suggesting a different diet or hunting style. (Some of this, of course, might be down to age or to the sex of the dragon, but it's unlikely that all of it is).
Notably, the 2E white dragon is even less intelligent than the previous version, being a bestial creature that rates lower than the typical ogre. On the other hand, they are all able to speak now, even if they're probably not the greatest of conversationalists.
3E
The snout becomes more beak-like in 3E, albeit with an unusual ventral spike at the tip of the mandible. No longer as sleek and large-eyed as in 1E, the head does at least seem to have a bony shield, without the visible scaling of the other chromatic species. There is a distinct dewlap at the throat, and the teeth appear more reptilian than in 1E. The banded scales have disappeared over most of the body, really only being apparent on the upper neck, while the long heavy tail looks crocodilian.
As with other dragons, the legs seem to have four toes on each foot, rather than the three they had previously, and the wing membrane is supported by four, not five digits. This means that the carpal claw has gone, to be replaced by a more flexible 'thumb' - although this curves backwards and, as usual, looks to be of limited utility.
White dragons remain the least intelligent of their kind, although adults are now level with the average human, so they're no longer actually stupid.
5E
As with other 5E dragons, the look has not changed much from 3E, and what there is - such as ridges on the joints of the alar phalanges - can be put down to differences of age. One thing that is apparent from the picture though, is the great size of the flight muscles in the chest. The shape of the wings implies a low aspect ratio, making the dragon manoeuvrable, but not fast; in reality, this would make more sense for a small flying animal in a cluttered environment such as a forest, but narrow canyons or the like might present a similar challenge.
The intelligence has dropped again, to somewhere between what it was in 1E and 2E. This is doubly significant, though, because, in this edition, dragons tend to be especially smart - perhaps as a result of their long lives giving them plenty of experience and opportunity for learning. At any rate, the fact that an adult white dragon is less intelligent than the average human (an IQ of about 90, assuming we take the 3d6 distribution literally) makes it dramatically different from any of the other true dragons.
White dragons are said to inhabit "frigid areas", typically in polar regions, although they can also be high mountains. This sometimes seems to be interpreted as anywhere that's snowy, with cold environments dotted with pine trees being depicted. Regions fitting this description, however, are free of snow in summer and may even be reasonably warm (albeit the 'summer' is quite short). This would seem to require the white dragons to migrate to colder climes at certain times of the year, which doesn't fit with their reliance on permanent lairs.
This leaves two habitat types as likely being the ones frequented by this kind of dragon. Firstly there is the tundra, which is equivalent to alpine meadow when the cold is due to high altitude rather than latitude. I've seen the term 'tundra' used to describe the sort of marginal pine forest (actually "taiga" in US/Canadian English) referred to above, but that isn't what it means. The defining feature of tundra is the presence of permafrost - the deep soil is permanently frozen, which prevents trees of any kind from setting down roots growing.
While there may be bushes and low shrubs, therefore, tundra is essentially treeless. This makes it easy for a winged predator to locate prey, but has the disadvantage that there isn't very much of it above the size of a rabbit. In our world, reindeer/caribou and musk oxen are about the only exceptions in polar regions; goats and snow leopards might be found in alpine meadows, but typically only in the summer, heading downslope in winter. Again, though, tundra is snow-free in summer, when the various plants there bloom and the surface ice melts to create boggy marshland. White dragons might estivate through the summer (that is, the warm season counterpart of hibernation), but otherwise they would have to spend at least some time hunting amidst some limited greenery - which would limit their camouflage.
Both of these options are possible, but a third alternative is to live in the other type of frigid habitat, the true lands of permanent ice and snow. This is most commonly where white dragons are said to live, and it's distinguished by a complete lack of vegetation beyond the odd bit of lichen near the margins. Which in turn means that there are, in our world, no animals to feed on that vegetation.
The exception to this is around the coasts, where polar bears and penguins can hunt on the plentiful food below the waves, and seals sometimes haul themselves out to rest on the ice floes. Judging from the descriptions, white dragons are not great swimmers, and won't be hunting underwater, but there might at least be something for them to eat if they're close to the coast where other animals can. Realistically, it wouldn't be great hunting for something the size of a dragon, but it would be better than a continental interior like Antarctica.
The D&D universe, however, often has a richer ecology in such barren places, with remorhaz, yeti, and frost giants, among others, inhabiting them. Leaving aside the question of what it is that they are eating, however, there's the further problem that most of them are immune to cold damage, rendering the white dragon's attack far less effective. (The white dragon is often said to use the breath weapon to freeze meat and preserve it for later use... but, again, why it would need to do that when it's surrounded by snow and ice isn't so obvious).
The white dragon's breath weapon is described as an "icy blast" a "cone of frost" or the like. Since it inflicts damage by its low temperature alone, it's evidently not pelting its foes with icy pellets or the like, and the implication is that it's just very cold air. But cold air alone, or even particles of frost, while it may be uncomfortable, or even painful, isn't going to kill as rapidly as a white dragon's breath does; frostbite, hypothermia and so on can be lethal, but not in that short a timespan.
But this doesn't apply if the white dragon is actually spraying out liquified air. This only need be around -185 °C (-300 °F), which is sufficient to liquify oxygen and thus create a spray mixed with gaseous nitrogen, but it just a further ten degrees to create liquid nitrogen as well, so that's no less likely. In either case, being splashed with the supercold liquid will do more immediate damage than gaseous air. It would also look rather like the white frosty blast we typically envisage, due to freezing out both water vapour and carbon dioxide from the ambient atmosphere.
Even assuming that the dragon is itself immune to the effects of these sorts of temperatures (which it's said to be), it's not really plausible for an organic creature to produce them without the aid of magic. In our world, the production of liquid air generally relies on the fact that gases heat up when you compress them, and then cool when you release the pressure. So you take some air, compress it so that it heats up, and then cool it back to some cold, but still fairly reasonable, temperature by normal means, and then let it expand so that it suddenly cools again from what's now already a low starting point.
Organic tissue really isn't going to be strong enough to do that, and even if it were, the dragon would still need to shed a lot of heat in the second part of the process. Even if it had some other means of cooling the air to cryogenic temperatures, the heat that's being removed still has to go somewhere if we're obeying the laws of physics, and the dragon would radiate heat like crazy. Which clearly they don't... so magic, not physics.
Indeed, it appears that white dragons have a very low body temperature. For example, 2E states that they have to keep their eggs cold in order to incubate them. Presumably, they are homeothermic, as mammals are, and other dragons appear to be, but the temperature that they maintain is probably subzero (at least on the celsius scale), so they aren't "warm-blooded" in the sense that we think of it in our world.
This presents a number of problems to do with physiology. Blood could be kept liquid with some sort of natural antifreeze, such as is found in Antarctic fish, but the dragon's metabolism would end up being slow and sluggish. Still, it would explain why they inhabit cold places, since it probably wouldn't take much ambient heat to make them really uncomfortable, and even suffer from heatstroke.
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