1176530 - All Firefox windows blank/white/empty in OS X in VMWare and VirtualBox

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1180688

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[timgil]

Attachment: ff39-os-x-vmware.png

Repro steps:

1. If needed, patch VMWare Workstation to support OS X
2. Boot OS X 10.10 in VMWare Workstation
3. Start Firefox 39 or 40 or 41
4. Observe that all Firefox windows are blank

Firefox 38.0.5 renders fine, so this regressed sometime after.

VMWare Workstation completely lacks 3D acceleration for OS X guests, which may be causing the problem.

Related:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=974007

Comment 1

[timgil]

Attachment: ff40-os-x-vmware.png

Comment 2

[timgil]

Attachment: ff41-os-x-vmware.png

Comment 3

[timgil]

Attachment: ff38-os-x-vmware-working-fine.png

Comment 4

[j.appleseed]

I see the same behavior with OS X (10.8, 10.9, 10.10) in VMware Fusion 7.1.2.
Not sure if related, but setting gfx.vsync.* to false didn't help.

Comment 5

[javascriptjedi]

This also happens in VirtualBox 4.3.10 and Mavericks (10.9.5).  So the problem is common to both VirtualBox and VMWare.  I have 3D acceleration enabled for this virtual machine, but 2D acceleration is not supported.

Comment 6

[dave.atherton]

I see the same behavior, OSX 10.10.4 - 14E33b (Host), 10.10.4 - 14E46 (Guest). Latest Firefox (39? A blank window is tough to read) broke it, as it worked before.

Comment 7

[megan]

I suspect this has to do with Project Silk. It also does not work on KVM, which means it seems to not be working on any virtualization platforms.

Comment 8

[Randy Sandberg]

I too was able to reproduce this issue using:

1. OS X 10.10.4 (host)
2. VMware Fusion 7.1.2
3. OS X 10.10.4 (virtual machine)
4. Firefox 39.0

Moreover, just like the original observation, I was able to regress back to Firefox 38.0.5 and the bug was not reproducible.

Comment 9

[[:philipp]]

i am confirming this because we see it in sumo a couple of times as well:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/all?tagged=bug1176530&show=all

Comment 10

[[:philipp]]

hi, do you think the symptoms described in this bug may have been caused by the landing of "project silk" on os x?

Comment 11

[Mason Chang [Inactive] [:mchang]]

You can try disabling silk:

about:config

gfx.vsync.* - Should be 3 preferences. Set them all to false. Does the problem still occur?

Comment 12

[Mason Chang [Inactive] [:mchang]]

Oh and restart Firefox after setting the preferences.

Comment 13

[timgil]

You can't reach about:config, because all the windows are blank :-)

Comment 14

[[:philipp]]

(In reply to timgil from comment #13)
> You can't reach about:config, because all the windows are blank :-)
please try to start firefox into safemode by pressing the shift key while launching the application

Comment 15

[timgil]

I see the same blank windows when starting with the shift key held down.

I closed Firefox, added

user_pref("gfx.vsync.compositor", false);
user_pref("gfx.vsync.hw-vsync.enabled", false);
user_pref("gfx.vsync.refreshdriver", false);

to my prefs.js, started Firefox, and that didn't change anything either.

Comment 16

[Milan Sreckovic [:milan] (needinfo for best results)]

This looks like a duplicate of bug 1180688.