Open Bug 1333961 Opened 8 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Firefox hangs trying to open broken site for tile display

Categories

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect, P3)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
New Tab Page
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: dvander, Unassigned)

Details

When I ran into bug 1333918, somehow Firefox decided to save the broken url into my frequently visited sites list. Now whenever I open a new empty tab, it tries to load this page in the content process to show a tile thumbnail, rendering the entire browser unusable for about 2-3 minutes. Eventually it gives up and I can start browsing until I load a new tab.

For now I just disabled the tile display.
This is the sort of bad bug that make Firefox seem really horrible no matter what a person does with it. However, I'm not sure what to do about this. We want to blacklist URLs that we have trouble rendering, but it's hard to know when we're having trouble. We would have to measure memory usage, CPU usage, and also look at whether we've crashed rendering the page in the past.

One thing I wonder is why we're even doing this. The new tab page is supposed to show frequently visited pages. If the user actually visits the page a lot, then shouldn't we capture the thumbnail when they visit it? Is this a privacy issue (we want to capture in PB mode)?
A dumb solution would be to load the tiles in a new content process, so then at least only your tiles are loading slow versus everything content related.

Do we interrupt painting tiles if we navigate away from about:blank?

Multi-process tabs would help too.
(In reply to David Anderson [:dvander] from comment #2)
> A dumb solution would be to load the tiles in a new content process, so then
> at least only your tiles are loading slow versus everything content related.

Yeah, maybe that's the best solution. We might be able to ask the OS to limit the amount of memory this process uses, and also give it a very low priority.

> Do we interrupt painting tiles if we navigate away from about:blank?

You mean about:newtab? I doubt it. I think we render them in the background even if you haven't looked at about:newtab yet.
I just hit this bug again, caching a flash page in the tile display (http://bear71.nfb.ca/#/bear71) has rendered Firefox unusable.
Priority: -- → P2
Moving to p3 because no activity for at least 1 year(s).
See https://github.com/mozilla/bug-handling/blob/master/policy/triage-bugzilla.md#how-do-you-triage for more information
Priority: P2 → P3
Severity: normal → S3
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.