Firefox issues in recent times.

[punkbiscuit]

I didn't want to hijack another thread about FF, as my comments are bit more generalised.

I use -

LM19.3 Cinnamon + all updates installed and a quad core Asus laptop (AMD12 CPU).

On the "other thread", there's debate about the UI for which I've not had any issues at all.
I will say this though, that since about the start of this year I've witnessed more crashes than ever when using FF.
The symptoms are all the same, FF locks up as well as the whole system, requiring power cycling to get it the PC running again.
The spinning hard disk light shows is constantly on, indicating lots of activity taking place.
I have to fsck the disk to remove lots of orphaned inodes,

Only happens on FF, not Chromium.
ALL other software and machine functions have zero issues.

The last update of FF from the LM repo though *appears" to be stable though, but time will tell.

One other oddity I noticed on the last update, was that for a brief while, loading graphic intensive webpages was blisteringly fast
but a day later it was back to normal. Normal being what I'd observe on any PC in terms of time etc.

[t42]

You can do some troubleshooting. Click the Menu button --> Click More Tools --> Click Task Manager. You can get the tabs and extensions impact and for sub-tusks, if any, click an arrow on the left. Also, try the performance with a new profile.

[mikeflan]

LM19.3 Cinnamon + all updates installed

Those type of crashes are very unusual in my opinion, but I am LM19.3 with FF 87.0. I won't update to 88 or 89 due to the problems I hear. In my case FF runs for weeks and months at a time, with 12+ windows on multiple workspaces. Runs for months and months with no crashes, but oddly I did have one crash just last week, but not on this main machine of mine. It was on a backup machine. It froze solid, so I had to restart.

[vjayer]

The symptoms are all the same, FF locks up as well as the whole system, requiring power cycling to get it the PC running again.
The spinning hard disk light shows is constantly on, indicating lots of activity taking place.
I have to fsck the disk to remove lots of orphaned inodes,

I've had the same symptom too historically with Fireofx on Linux on any low memory machine and it seems like there's a point where it gets into what I call a swap death spiral (the disk activity light). How much memory do you have?
With 4GB of RAM I'm very likely to encounter this swap death spiral if I don't do some mitigation techniques:
- limit overall tabs and windows
- occasionally closing / restarting Firefox, and just restoring last session
- using the Tab Unloader add-on to regularly unload all other unused tabs, then using about:memory and doing a "minimize memory usage"
- the Tab Unloader step allows me to avoid having the close/restart Firefox as often as I did before

When I do hit this swap death spiral, there are a couple ways around this that might work:
- have a console session already logged in before hand, and switch to it (ctrl+Fxx), .. and wait for a while when it tries to do so when swapping, wait even further to type and enter "pkill firefox"
- try to ssh in, but better yet, have a ssh session already logged in before hand, and to the same, pkill firefox

with 8gb it may be less likely but there's still a limit

The last update of FF from the LM repo though *appears" to be stable though, but time will tell.

One other oddity I noticed on the last update, was that for a brief while, loading graphic intensive webpages was blisteringly fast
but a day later it was back to normal. Normal being what I'd observe on any PC in terms of time etc.

might be because the new Firefox 89 enables a new hardware accelerated graphical method by default

Honestly I'm at the point where I might just switch browsers, maybe to Chormium or Brave. I've bared the pain so far due to add-ons, but Firefox on Linux just does not behave as well as it does on Windows. Also part of the blame might just be on how the Linux kernel handles swapping and interrupts from the mouse / keyboard as Windows Firefox with 4GB also swaps often but I know they have special handling for GUI and mouse/kb events to always come through (see also how ctrl+alt+del is super high priority, interrupting even unresponsive machines to bring up the task manager)

[punkbiscuit]

Well I have been monitoring the situation for a little while now, and it looks like the problem has ceased.

In the beginning, things just ran smoothly with the same 4Gb of RAM with multiple tabs open for at least a week, depending upon
whether I had intentionally closed it or not.

The last few months though were poor, and of course there have been OS updates too added to the mix, so that makes it harder
to pin down.

But my gut feeling was that it was FF.

Maybe something has been re-written and the problem solved.

One other problem is the lack of changelogs with FF upgrades, and knowing if a problem has been acknowledged or solved is impossible to tell.

However for now, things seem back to normal.

[karlchen]

One other problem is the lack of changelogs with FF upgrades, and knowing if a problem has been acknowledged or solved is impossible to tell.

The Mint developer team only repackage Firefox. They do not develop and maintain it themselves.
Therefore the Firefox changelogs have to be and can be read on the corresponding Mozilla Firefox release pages.

I will give a few samples of the most recent pages. I am sure you will find out how to retrieve release notes for other versions quickly.

• FF 89.0 release notes
• FF 88.0.1 release notes
• FF 88.0 release notes

[punkbiscuit]

Thanks for the info Karlchen.

Whilst it goes some way to knowing what's been done, I personally feel that having to take this route is something that is
another task for the user to undertake before deciding if a release is worth upgrading to.

I'd still rather have some basic into available to be shown in the Update Manager like everything else seems to have.

Even some brief plain language stuff would do, for example whether something has been done to avoid crashes under
certain circumstances etc.

Being honest, my confidence is feeling somewhat broken in recent months, and I'm now on my guard with simply doing blind updates.

From no on, if it works then I'm sticking with.

I can't afford to have constant crashes like before, especially whilst in the middle of doing a financial transaction (Paypal or credit card)
and then left wondering if there's gonna be problems.

Trust is gonna have to be rebuilt

As an aside, for the first time ever on any Linux system, I was forced to edit my GRUB to include fsck on boot, it was that bad.

[Petermint]

in the middle of doing a financial transaction

Web sites are getting worse every day in that area, no matter what Web browser you use. In the end you have to use a browser with absolutely no security or privacy and let the vendor code blindly jump across all the Web sites paying the vendor for your information.

Plus they are doing it with Javascript which means it will fail on most browsers.

A Web browser that is secure, private, and usable is the enemy of corporations. The one good thing about Firefox is the range of add-ons to let you experiment with different approaches to security, privacy, and usability.

Some of the FF derivatives could be worth exploring. Sort of like using the Linux Mint version of Ubuntu instead of using Ubuntu direct. A version of FF with Noscript built in would be my first choice. There are too many for me to test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category: ... on_Firefox

[karlchen]

Hello, punkbiscuit.

Maybe some of your technical troubles with the recent Firefox 89.0 have been fixed by Mozilla in Firefox 89.0.1.
See the Firefox release notes, please: Firefox 89.0.1 Release Notes.
Mozilla fixed a number of bugs, some of which affected Linux systems explicitly.

Regards,
Karl
--

Code: Select all

karl@unimatrix0:~
$ firefox --version
Mozilla Firefox 89.0.1

[punkbiscuit]

Thanks Karlchen.

Looks like there have been bugs afterall.

Gotta admit that so far 89.0 is working very well now, so I'm happy again

[AZgl1800]

one particular Firefox "bug" or whatever it is, that has happened with me, I have never been able to determine the 'why' of it.

on occasion, I will pull mouse down below the Task bar / Panel if you will, and then the whole laptop just freezes solid.

sometimes, cntl-alt-prnScren SUO will shut it down nicely.
other times, it won't, so I use the BIOS hard shutdown method.

if anything weird shows up after that, I run Timeshift from the last previous Daily and restore things to the way they were.
usually, that is now required though.