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 6:20 PM, Paul Goyette wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Aug 2015, David H. Gutteridge wrote:
> 
>> 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.)
> 
> How does one do this for a pkgsrc build?  I don't see the string "layers" anywhere in the firefox files, except for one patch-file (referring to a list of DIRS)
> 
> 	# grep layers * */*
> 	patches/patch-gfx_moz.build:     'layers',
> 	# grep -B3 -A6 layers patches/patch-gfx_moz.build
> 	@@ -15,8 +21,6 @@ DIRS += [
> 	     'qcms',
> 	     'gl',
> 	     'layers',
> 	-    'graphite2/src',
> 	-    'harfbuzz/src',
> 	     'ots/src',
> 	     'thebes',
> 	     'ipc',

You don't need to recompile to test it, it's a user-configurable
setting at runtime.

(1) Start Firefox
(2) Enter "about:config" in the address bar and click through the
warning
(3) Paste layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled into the search bar
(4) Right click on it and toggle it to "false"
(5) Restart Firefox

At least one Linux distribution is currently disabling it by default
at compile time, though. There is no existing string you'd find to
match in the source to do so, it has to be added to a preferences file
that overrides the stock defaults. Fedora's means of doing so can be
found here:

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/firefox.git/commit/?id=a6110e417ba47f907dae50c6420a14f8c628eb29

Regards,

Dave