1448146 - If HWA is disabled/blocked, Nightly is opened with black window flashed at start up.

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect, P1)

Description

[Alice0775 White]

This is annoying.

Reproducible : always

Steps To Reproduce:
1. Disable HWA
2. Close browser
3. Launch Nightly

Actual Results:
black window without UI is opened at start up.  And then switch to normal color.

Expected Results:
No black window at start up.

Regression window:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/pushloghtml?fromchange=e21a2a57d05dfe3c5ff8ba71131127fa781ffdd0&tochange=f026ead5dbfce9d6530429ac568ecc5544cc9b3b

Regressed by: f026ead5dbfc	Florian Quèze — Bug 1447719 - Set browser.startup.blankWindow to true on Windows and Linux, r=mconley.


And I confirmed that setting browser.startup.blankWindow = false fixed the problem


@:florian,
Your patch seems to cause the regression. Can you look into this?

Comment 1

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

How do you disable HWA?

Comment 2

[Alice0775 White]

(In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] from comment #1)
> How do you disable HWA?

1. about:preferences > General > Performance
2. Uncheck "Use recommended performance setting"
3. Uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available"

OR
1. Using Blocked old GPU card.

Comment 3

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

I'm experiencing this black flash on Firefox start even with Hardware Acceleration enabled.

Setting "browser.startup.blankWindow" preference to "false" fixes it, as workaround,
but it's making bug #1446264 back at start.

Comment 4

[Alice0775 White]

Attachment: black_window_is_flashing_at_startup.ogg (runninng Nightly on VM)

Comment 5

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Alice0775 White from comment #4)
> Created attachment 8961655 [details]
> black_window_is_flashing_at_startup.ogg (runninng Nightly on VM)

Startup is so slow in this video that IMO showing a black window is better there than having no visual feedback that Firefox is starting.

(In reply to Alice0775 White from comment #2)
> (In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] from comment #1)
> > How do you disable HWA?
> 
> 1. about:preferences > General > Performance
> 2. Uncheck "Use recommended performance setting"
> 3. Uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available"

Interesting, this sets the layers.acceleration.disabled pref to true. When I do that, at startup I get a white window, followed by a black flash and then by the browser UI appearing. This is very ugly :(.

If I also set layers.gpu-process.enabled to false, I don't get the white window before the black paint.

(In reply to Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] from comment #3)
> I'm experiencing this black flash on Firefox start even with Hardware
> Acceleration enabled.

This is probably a separate bug with a missing step to reproduce (sounds similar to bug 1447549 comment 5 which I'm not able to reproduce). I can reproduce the black flash if I follow the steps from comment 2.

Comment 6

[Alice0775 White]

The video of comment#5 is on vm(blocked GPU).
The behavior might be different between |disabled HWA on non-blocked GPU| and |blocked GPU|.

Comment 7

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Alice0775 White from comment #6)
> The video of comment#5 is on vm(blocked GPU).
> The behavior might be different between |disabled HWA on non-blocked GPU|
> and |blocked GPU|.

Makes sense; I would expect us to not start a gpu process is the GPU is blocked.

Comment 8

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

This is an [fxperf:p1] - should we assign this to you, florian?

Comment 9

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

Florian, will bug 1450293 fix this?

Comment 10

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Panos Astithas [:past] (please ni?) from comment #9)
> Florian, will bug 1450293 fix this?

This bug is marked as affecting Windows, and the current patch in bug 1450293 fixes it for Windows, so "yes". But bug 1450408 comment 0 says the black flash also occurs on Linux, so "not sure".

Comment 11

[Marion Daly [:mdaly]]

Status?

Comment 12

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Marion Daly [:mdaly] from comment #11)
> Status?

Fixed in bug 1450293, at least for Windows.

Comment 13

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Alice, can you confirm that things are looking better on your end?

Comment 14

[Alice0775 White]

yes, at least for Windows, it was fixed.

However, I can still reproduce the black flashing on startup on Linux(ubuntu16.04 and Linux MINT).

Comment 15

[Alice0775 White]

(In reply to Alice0775 White from comment #14)
> yes, at least for Windows, it was fixed.
> 
> However, I can still reproduce the black flashing on startup on
> Linux(ubuntu16.04 and Linux MINT).

just now updated nightly, no longer reproduce on linux too.

Comment 16

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Thanks for confirming!

Comment 17

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop QA [:csasca]]

I verified on Firefox 61.0b6 and Nightly (2018-05-20) under Windows 10 (x64) and macOS 10.12 and the issue is fixed. However on Ubuntu 16.04 (x64), the black window at startup is present, even without HWA disabled. Firefox 60 is unaffected on all three systems. Here is a screencast: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1OBLSto7Si1w-ln7jtEAU7dkjpkdVDjJV

Hi Jim, since Florian is currently unavailable, I'd like to know what you think about this issue on Ubuntu?

Comment 18

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Sasca Catalin, QA [:csasca] from comment #17)

The issue on Ubuntu is covered by bug 1450626.

Comment 19

[Vlad Lucaci, Desktop QA (:vlucaci)]

Considering the comments from above, this issue can be closed as the Ubuntu issue is being covered by bug 1450626.