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

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 18 August 2015 at 22:02, David H. Gutteridge
<dhgutteridge%sympatico.ca@localhost> 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.)

Thanks for the pointer - testing with
layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled=false now. No crashes yet, but
too soon to tell :)