1092721 - latest update crashes constantly

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[login+persona]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0
Build ID: 20141016181215

Steps to reproduce:

Visit http://www.theguardian.com/uk
Open any of the articles
Whilst reading the article the browser crashes, note that the crash is not instant. I will usually make it quite a way down the article, it seems that the crashes happens more often when I reach the first adverts, but I can easily have almost completed reading the article before the crash. By crashes I mean the screen goes black for a few seconds and then renders the android "home" screen. Note that the usual crash reporting screen that opens when an app crashes or is unresponsive does not appear in this instance. If I start firefox again it will have forgotten all my opened tabs. Generally this crash happens 90 % of the time for the guardian website (although whilst writing this bug report it did not crash on the first article but did on the second, usually it will crash on the first article I look at). The problem happens also on the independent website (http://www.independent.co.uk/, open an article, read ...), but less often (I may be able to get through 2-3 articles before the crash. Strangely this problem does not occur on the BBC news website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/).

I am using a google galaxy nexus phone on tesco mobile (O2) that is is fully updated (android 4.3, kernel build on Jun 7 2013) with the latest vesion of firefox (I dont know where to look to find the version, tries looking in settings, help and on the google play page, none report the version)

Note that all the url's listed are from my desktop browser, so my phone may have redirected to the mobile version (I do not have the "Request Desktop Site" option selected)

Using the stock android browser the problem seems to disappear. I can read the guardian articles almost all the time, the browser did crash once (or maybe twice) in the last week, but that may be unrelated.

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Can you attach a logcat from your device capturing your attempt to load the site and when the browser crashes?

Comment 2

[login+persona]

Attachment: alogcat log for a crash

alogcat log for a crash. As soon as I started alogcat I opened firefox on the guardian website, opened an article and started reading it. After a minute or so the app crashed. To me it looks like the 21:11:51 entry coincides with just after the crash, but it doesn't seem to say anything interesting.

Comment 3

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

You'll need to use the log-cat program utility bundled in the Android SDK https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html?hl=i; aLogcat doesn't capture much of anything on Android 4.3

Comment 4

[login+persona]

Attachment: adb logcat of a crash

firefox crashed after a couple of minutes of reading a http://www.theguardian.com/ article

Comment 5

[xds_xps_ivx]

Well, I notticed the site lagging quite a bit when loading images. Sometimes they show up as low-res pictures for a brief moment, but no crash whatsoever. It might be because I'm using a high-end device.
Can someone else confirm and post what device are you testing on?
- NVIDIA Shield Tablet

Comment 6

[bacam+mozbz]

I've been experiencing this regularly with the Guardian website on a Nexus 5.  Normally it just dies, taking a bunch of other Android processes with it (just as the logs above show), but I did just get the crash reporter for a change.  Unfortunately it looks like there isn't much information there either (it's id c94a18fc-3bfe-4edc-b03d-525882150104).

I suspect the problem is related to the large square animated adverts they have a few paragraphs into each article.  If I leave the browser at the top of the article nothing bad happens, but if I leave it over the advert it crashes after a minute or so.

Also, I just tried looking at an article on the desktop version of the site (which appears to contain the same kind of advert), and got crash 7df8d6cd-6001-4628-85ab-30bba2150104, which the crash-stats website reckons might be related to bug 1110528, and that's been fixed in later versions.  The current beta from the play store still crashes, though, so perhaps that was just a coincidence.

Comment 7

[login+persona]

I am also convinced this is to do with the square advert, my crashes happen almost always after I see the advert and it is almost always the duracell advert that is being rendered. Most other adverts do not cause the problem.

Comment 8

[bacam+mozbz]

The Duracell advert hasn't been around recently, and I haven't had problems with the new ones in its place.  Also, bug 1041968 has similar symptoms, and while none of the URLs crash for me they all have prominent ads.

Comment 9

[tbtoft]

Does it still happen with the latest version? Does it happen in Nightly?

Comment 10

[bacam+mozbz]

I'm not the original reporter, but after that particular bunch of ads were rotated off The Guardian's site I haven't had many crashes like that.

Comment 11

[login+persona]

I tried the latest version from the google play site (I am not using the nightly) and it does seem to be stable. I have been using it for 20 minutes with a number of tabs open on sites which used to crash firefox reliably and it hasn't crashed once.

I had stopped using firefox because it was so unreliable, I will use it for the rest of the week to see if it does crash.

Comment 12

[supersluether]

Using the latest Nightly 48.0a1 on a OnePlus 2,the website rendering does slow down when I reach an ad, but it doesn't crash. The text goes slightly blurry for a second, and sometimes part of the article is white for a second. 

Can the reporter confirm the bug on the latest version of Nightly?

Comment 13

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Closing as incomplte