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

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

On 2015-08-18, at 5:02 PM, David H. Gutteridge wrote:
> 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.)

I should add, re. "many reports", there are actually reports of
multiple causes of significant instability in Firefox 40. Another
possibly unrelated cause to the one I mentioned above is their "top
crasher" right now. They're apparently considering another point
release to fix it, as that one is already resolved in version 41.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1145230

The "off main thread" compositing issue may be specific to particular
Linux distributions, but it's an easy tweak to test anyway.

Regards,

Dave