1424217 - Problems with Webroot and Firefox 57.0.1

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(External Software Affecting Firefox :: Other, defect)

Description

[contactroberto]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.94 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I first want to point out I originally found the recent firefox upgrade 57.0.1  very buggy. I have experienced no end of crashing, hanging when viewing typical websites which worked previously such as the W3C validation site. I am running windows7  64 bit

Then a client drew attention to a certain bug with her website using firefox. She runs a charity website which accepts donations via paypal. You click the donate button and should be sent to the paypal site to send the donation amount. But on Firefox the browser hangs on the intermediary 'please wait' screen where as in opera, chrome, internet explorer and safari you are sent directly to paypal.

So clearly FF v.57.0.1 is very glitchy on windows. I tried starting FF up in safe mode and the paypal donation suddenly worked but only the first time I tested. Also I tried a firefox refresh from inside the control panel and again the paypal donation sequence worked fine in FF. But only the first time, the second time it would again hang. I did some research on the mozilla forum and discovered a known bug with GDATA virus protection:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-startup-crash-g-data-security-software

But my client does not use GDATA she has Webroot and another computer of hers has Norton. An advisor form the mozilla forum suggested I whitelist webroot in the virus protection main control panel and voila suddenly FF was up and running. But you have to keep Webroot marked as 'safe' or exempt from protection. So even though ‘whitelisting’ gets rounds the issue - you cant be protected while you surf!

I understand that the more recent release of FF https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/57.0.2/releasenotes/    57.0.2 is supposed to solve the issue with GDATA but I upgraded and re-tested on my client’s machine running webroot and it still does not function. So clearly there is still a clash with other AV software such as Webroot and Norton which still needs to be resolved. 


Actual results:

please see above


Expected results:

please see above

Comment 1

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(In reply to contactroberto from comment #0)
> But my client does not use GDATA she has Webroot and another computer of
> hers has Norton.

Can they reproduce the problem on both machines?

Comment 2

[contactroberto]

I have tested on the machine running webroot only https://www.webroot.com/gb/en/home/products/av
If you look at the following screen shot this shows what her AV looks like: 
https://webroot.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/6511iFB6436CD35FE88CB?v=1.0
Note firefox is tabbed 'protected' in this state Firefox keeps crashing.
You have to un-tab and select 'allow' Firefox which is probably a very insecure way to surf.

Note also you do not have to alter the same settings for any other browser to work fine with paypal.


I do not currently have access to the PC with Norton but client assures me this does not behave either.

Comment 3

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(In reply to contactroberto from comment #2)
> I have tested on the machine running webroot only
> https://www.webroot.com/gb/en/home/products/av
> If you look at the following screen shot this shows what her AV looks like: 
> https://webroot.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/
> 6511iFB6436CD35FE88CB?v=1.0
> Note firefox is tabbed 'protected' in this state Firefox keeps crashing.
> You have to un-tab and select 'allow' Firefox which is probably a very
> insecure way to surf.

I wouldn't worry too much about this, it isn't a "very insecure way to surf", you can definitely use it as a workaround for now.

> I do not currently have access to the PC with Norton but client assures me
> this does not behave either.

Let's make this bug about Webroot then, since you are sure you can reproduce with it.

Comment 4

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Hello Johnny, are you aware of this problem?

Comment 5

[contactroberto]

(In reply to Marco Castelluccio [:marco] from comment #3)
> (In reply to contactroberto from comment #2)
> > I have tested on the machine running webroot only
> > https://www.webroot.com/gb/en/home/products/av
> > If you look at the following screen shot this shows what her AV looks like: 
> > https://webroot.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/
> > 6511iFB6436CD35FE88CB?v=1.0
> > Note firefox is tabbed 'protected' in this state Firefox keeps crashing.
> > You have to un-tab and select 'allow' Firefox which is probably a very
> > insecure way to surf.
> 
> I wouldn't worry too much about this, it isn't a "very insecure way to
> surf", you can definitely use it as a workaround for now.
> 
> > I do not currently have access to the PC with Norton but client assures me
> > this does not behave either.
> 
> Let's make this bug about Webroot then, since you are sure you can reproduce
> with it.

I have full access to client's machine with webroot. Never needed to tab firefox 'allow' before to use previous versions of Firefox. I would add if you do not tab as 'allow' FF frequently crashes/freezes for no apparent reason. I would imagine Norton work the same way - needs to be sorted for Norton as well V. popular virus protection.

Comment 6

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(In reply to contactroberto from comment #5)
> I have full access to client's machine with webroot. Never needed to tab
> firefox 'allow' before to use previous versions of Firefox.

Yes, it's likely a bug in the way Webroot injects itself into Firefox.

> I would add if
> you do not tab as 'allow' FF frequently crashes/freezes for no apparent
> reason.

Can you open about:crashes and post the links to your crashes here?

> I would imagine Norton work the same way - needs to be sorted for
> Norton as well V. popular virus protection.

Could you open a separate bug for Norton?

Comment 7

[contactroberto]

I think the client would be dubious about sharing information from her PC even just crash reports.
If both of the client PCs crash, just with the latest automatic upgrade from Firefox, both equipped with very popular AV such as Norton and webroot and you have already had to resolve a clash with GDATA, then surely you should download a copy of norton and webroot and experiment with these settings your self and try and figure out why the browser has such major issues.

Comment 8

[Johnny Shaw]

It's possible this is related to a performance issue that was found in Quantum with WRusr. Sorry, I'm not up to date on your versions, would this fall under that category? If so, I believe we have a fix for this coming down the pipeline.

Comment 9

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(In reply to contactroberto from comment #7)
> I think the client would be dubious about sharing information from her PC
> even just crash reports.

They have already shared them with us, we just need to know which ones they are.
All the reports in about:crashes are reports that the user decided to share with us and which were uploaded to our servers.

> If both of the client PCs crash, just with the latest automatic upgrade from
> Firefox, both equipped with very popular AV such as Norton and webroot and
> you have already had to resolve a clash with GDATA, then surely you should
> download a copy of norton and webroot and experiment with these settings
> your self and try and figure out why the browser has such major issues.

There was a bug in G-Data that was causing a crash. It's very unlikely that Norton and Webroot are affected by the same bug as G-Data.

Could you also share the URL of the website where you are seeing the problem?

(In reply to Johnny Shaw from comment #8)
> It's possible this is related to a performance issue that was found in
> Quantum with WRusr. Sorry, I'm not up to date on your versions, would this
> fall under that category? If so, I believe we have a fix for this coming
> down the pipeline.

Yes, 57.0.1 is Quantum. Thanks for the quick update!

Comment 10

[contactroberto]

As of Firefox version 57.0.1 in privacy and security the following option is un-tabbed by default.
'Allow Firefox to send crash reports to Mozilla'

As I said the client will be dubious about sending any personal data from her PC. I would suggest you download web root and experiment with the settings I described earlier to replicate the issue.

With the PC running webroot many websites crash including paypal and the w3c standards website:
https://www.paypal.com/gb/webapps/mpp/merchant
https://validator.w3.org/

It sounds like Johnny Shaw has a fix on its way. This issue must be affecting millions of people with web root or Norton so why not download a copy.

Comment 11

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(In reply to contactroberto from comment #10)
> As of Firefox version 57.0.1 in privacy and security the following option is
> un-tabbed by default.
> 'Allow Firefox to send crash reports to Mozilla'
> 
> As I said the client will be dubious about sending any personal data from
> her PC. I would suggest you download web root and experiment with the
> settings I described earlier to replicate the issue.

If you go to "about:crashes", there's a section that shows the crashes that have been shared with us.
They have been shared after asking to the user, so if they show there, we already have that information.
I'm only asking for the links now, so I can identify which reports they are in our large database of reports.

> With the PC running webroot many websites crash including paypal and the w3c
> standards website:
> https://www.paypal.com/gb/webapps/mpp/merchant
> https://validator.w3.org/
> 

Johnny is talking about a performance fix. You are mentioning that you are experiencing crashes. So they might be different issues.
Are you sure you are experiencing crashes on those websites? Can you describe precisely what is happening?

> It sounds like Johnny Shaw has a fix on its way. This issue must be
> affecting millions of people with web root or Norton so why not download a
> copy.

We can try to reproduce, but note that most of the time AV issues are restricted to very particular configurations and we are not able to reproduce them.

Comment 12

[Johnny Shaw]

Our fix aims to resolve issues we've seen where certain websites cause 100% CPU to occur for the FF process. If you guys see that it is likely the same issue.

Comment 13

[Greg Stoll :gstoll]

We've had many releases of Firefox since this bug was reported, and fixed some other issues with WebRoot (for example bug 1752466), so this doesn't seem to be an issue anymore. Closing.