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macOS Catalina hang when Firefox use hardware acceleration

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 19 views
  • Last reply by marcodirio

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Hi all, starting from a couple of week i notice that during normal web surfing my iMac late 2013 was hanging apparently without reason. Nor force quit or other application working, the mouse pointer was with the spinning color disk but i were unable to do nothig. The only solution was to switch off the iMac.

Start searching i point the fact that when this happen i was always whatching a youtube video, make other search point me to the browser hardware acceleration.


Now i'm using Firefox 74.0 (last release) and seem that when the hardware acceleration is enable after same minutes of youtube, the problems starts.

First signal is the other web pages that start loading but nothig is loaded after that all the system beacame unresponsive and the only solution is to switch off.


I had this problem either with catalina 10.15.3 and 10.15.4 (last version).

Very strange that a browser problem could hang the entire system.


Any suggestion?

Other with the same annoying problem?

Hi all, starting from a couple of week i notice that during normal web surfing my iMac late 2013 was hanging apparently without reason. Nor force quit or other application working, the mouse pointer was with the spinning color disk but i were unable to do nothig. The only solution was to switch off the iMac. Start searching i point the fact that when this happen i was always whatching a youtube video, make other search point me to the browser hardware acceleration. Now i'm using Firefox 74.0 (last release) and seem that when the hardware acceleration is enable after same minutes of youtube, the problems starts. First signal is the other web pages that start loading but nothig is loaded after that all the system beacame unresponsive and the only solution is to switch off. I had this problem either with catalina 10.15.3 and 10.15.4 (last version). Very strange that a browser problem could hang the entire system. Any suggestion? Other with the same annoying problem?

All Replies (2)

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I found a bug related to this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409601

So I assume it is being investigated and resolved in a future update :)

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The bug is related to Windows....don't know if could be the same with MacOS. In my case i was unable to check the CPU/GPU consumption

Modified by marcodirio