1278092 - Firefox hangs about once a day, inconsistently, shortly after a new page starts loading

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[stephenmerriman]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0
Build ID: 20160502172042

Steps to reproduce:

Simply visit any one of a huge number of URLs where I've had this happen.

This is a little tricky, since while this happens virtually every single day, it is inconsistent - a page that caused a crash one day will work perfectly fine if loaded numerous times the next day, and vice versa. 

There are some pages where it seems to happen more regularly though - I've had it happen multiple times at the URL https://player.vimeo.com/video/104003794 (this was in an iframe on the original site, but in debugging I've tried visiting it directly and had hangs there too). It doesn't seem to be video specific - it has also occurred visiting a very simple forum page in http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=38 .


Actual results:

During browsing, I open a new tab or enter a new URL in the current tab. The page starts loading, then after a few seconds, Firefox freezes and becomes unresponsive. 

If I sit back and do nothing, it stays unresponsive indefinitely.

If I click on the window in the taskbar a few times to try to minimise / show the window, shortly afterwards an unresponsive dialog pops up pointing at the inferFromText function in chrome://browser/content/browser.js . At the point the dialog appears, the website resumes loading to completion in the background. Regardless of whether I click Continue, Stop Script, or Debug Script, Firefox refreezes.

If I go into Task Manager, and attempt to end the process there, the window disappears and CPU usage zeroes out, but the process refuses to be killed. Attempting to reopen Firefox thus leads to a 'Firefox is already running' message. The process eventually disappears after 2-3 minutes.


Expected results:

No freezes!

Additional information: 

None of the following have helped resolve the problem:

- disabling all add-ons
- disabling hardware acceleration / webgl
- disabling flash
- running Firefox with a brand new profile
- running Firefox in safe mode

I can't pinpoint exactly when this started, but it could well have been shortly after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It never happened before this.

On the occasion the forum URL above hung, the Firefox status bar said it was waiting for a Google ad URL to load. I opened Fiddler and then clicked on the Firefox window a few times to get the unresponsive dialog box to open. As the website finished loading behind the dialog, the Google ad was the only http request that was sent out.

On the most recent occasion where the Vimeo URL crashed, I ran the crashfirefox program to generate this crash report:

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/b14aba92-d2ea-4b23-92a9-4ddfd2160605

I am a web dev who likes to solve problems with debugging so if there are any steps I can do to provide more information of what's going on, please let me know how to do so.

Comment 1

[stephenmerriman]

Using Windows Event Viewer I think I've tracked this down to a driver issue so probably not a Firefox bug - I'm going to resolve this while I investigate further.