Re: Firefox 40 crashes (Was: Will Firefox run on the PI and how stable is it?)

["David H. Gutteridge" <dhgutteridge%sympatico.ca@localhost>]

On Tue, 18 Aug 2015 at 13:55:26 +0100 (BST), abs%absd.org@localhost wrote:
>David Brownlee wrote:
>>On 14 August 2015 at 01:33, Paul Goyette <paul%vps1.whooppee.com@localhost> wrote:
>>>
>>>FWIW, I recently installed Firefox 40.0 on my amd64 system.  In the
>>>past 24 hours, it has crashed twice.  (Once while scrolling through a
>>>long page, once overnight while I was sleeping and nothing was
>>>happening!)
>>>
>>>I have not had any time to investigate further, but I might suggest
>>>that 40.0 has "stability issues".  :)
>>
>>I've recently updated to Firefox 40, most recent pkgsrc on most recent
>>netbsd-7 amd64 and have noticed it now crashes at unpredictable
>>intervals. Possibly more often shortly after opening a new tab but
>>that may be anecdotal...
>
>I got crashes too so rolled back to 39.
>
>I have a debug build of 40 but couldn't see anything obvious to change.

The first thing to try is to set the configuration value
layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled to false. (It is set to true
by default in the pkgsrc build.) This is the new feature listed in
the release notes as "Improved scrolling, graphics, and video
playback performance with off main thread compositing (GNU/Linux
only)". (I don't think it's really "GNU/Linux only" like they say.)
There are many reports of Firefox crashing regularly on Linux with
this setting enabled. (I'm one of the reporters. After turning that
setting off in "about:config", it's now running stably for me. I
haven't had a chance to use it heavily in NetBSD yet.)

Regards,

Dave