Firefox stops responding at random times.
I'm running ArchLinux with Xfce 4.16.
One of the lastest firefox updates has broken it on my system. It keeps crashing at random times, most of the time when I do some action, maybe press a button on a website, maybe open a new window, maybe select some text on a website... It doesn't occur always, most of the time things work fine, but, at some point, I perform an action that has worked fine the last few times, and it hangs the browser.
The easiest way I found to replicate it is by opening and closing the Downloads window. Around 15% of the times I open it, the browser stops responding completely.
I'm not sure which firefox version introduced the bug because I don't update the system so often. My last pacman updates where January-2022 and November-2022. The version from January-2022 worked fine but since the November-2022 update I've been experiencing this problem.
I've created a new profile, disabled hardware acceleration but the problem persist. I'm also not using any kind of proxy, its a clean profile.
Running it from the console only shows one message at startup, but nothing when the browser hangs.
This is the message shown at startup:
[GFX1-]: glxtest: VA-API test failed: failed to initialise VAAPI connection. [2022-12-17T23:22:27Z ERROR glean_core::metrics::ping] Invalid reason code start
But the browser can be working for half an hour after it with no problems.
All Replies (7)
Hi
It sounds like you may be using the version from the Arch repo, not a version direct from Mozilla such as the snap, flatpak or tarball.
Please can you try a Mozilla version and see if that resolves the issue?
Ok, the version I had from arch repos was 107.0.1
I downloaded the tarball from Firefox website version 108.0.1 and I'm experiencing the same failure.
What is really strange is, since I downloaded it, I cannot make the repo version hang anymore. It usually take opening the downloads window less than 10 times to make it crash, it is the same for the 108 version, but since I downloaded it, I've been opening the downloads window around 100 times on the 107v without a single hang. The 108v still crashes as usual, with less than 10 tries.
Adding a little more info, firefox is the only app that is having issues, I run a wide variety of programs on this computer on a daily basis and all of them work fine, so I would discard a physical failure of the computer memory or something.
In order to assist you better, please follow the steps below to provide us crash IDs to help us learn more about your crash.
The crash report is several pages of data. We need the report numbers to see the whole report.
- Enter about:crashes in the Firefox address bar and press Enter. A list of Submitted/Unsubmitted Crash Reports will appear, similar to the one shown below.
- Copy the 5 most recent Submitted Report IDs that start with bp- and then go back to your forum question and paste those IDs into the "Post a Reply" box.
Note: If a recent Report ID does not start with bp- click on it to submit the report.
(Please don't take a screenshot of your crashes, just copy and paste the IDs. The below image is just an example of what your Firefox screen should look like.)
Thank you for your help!
More information and further troubleshooting steps can be found in the Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly) article.
Sorry, english is not my main language and I probably explained myself wrong.
Firefox doesn't crash. It just "hangs" or stop responding at all. The window is still open but nothing updates on it, no buttons on the browser or in the site do anything, i cannot even switch tabs, etc...
After a while, the OS shows a message telling that firefox has stopped responding, giving me the option to force quit it. That the only way to close the window (that or sending directly a SIGKILL to its process)
So there is no crash report generated. On my about:crashes page, only appear some old crashes from 6 months ago, but nothing recent:
Are you running Wayland?
Nop I use Xorg, it's a pretty standard arch installation, nothing fancy.
After trying all morning, I managed to make firefox crash one time opening the downloads window and generate a report, not sure if its related with the problem that made me open the thread here but here it goes:
bp-f220ba61-c840-4134-9bd9-13dd20221218
It says the same as the terminal does: GraphicsCriticalError |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: VA-API test failed: failed to initialise VAAPI connection. (t=0.276624)
Maybe not a firefox issue but an nvidia drivers problem?
If the distro and Mozilla version have the same issue, then it's something else IMHO.