1486231 - Firefox renders blank pages when many tabs are open

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Graphics, defect, P3)

Description

[x-o-o]

Attachment: Screenshot (20).png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0
Build ID: 20180807170231

Steps to reproduce:

Open a large number of tabs, all with open pages. I don't have an exact number, but it is somewhere between 60 and 100 tabs. Firefox shows 1.8GB memory, out of 24GB on the system.

Windows 10, on a continuously running machine, with plenty of horsepower. As of now the uptime is ~10 days, but goes into hibernate daily.


Actual results:

At a certain point, new tabs start to load completely blank. It happens sporadically, meaning that if you get a tab, point it to e.g. mozilla.org, and it is blank, if you open a new tab (keeping the old blank one still open), and point it to mozilla.org, it may still render correctly.

Sometimes it is a blank white page. Sometimes it is a blank gray page. Background may be page-dependent. Opening the inspector shows the DOM is present. Opening a tab to a youtube video will show the video player block (black div) showing up for a split-second before the page goes blank, and you can hear the audio from the page. On youtube, the video player's progress bar is visible on hover. Context menus work on the page.

Staring a new tab with ctrl-T sometimes shows the personalized home (Top sites, recommended by pocket, highlights), and sometimes shows a blank white page. I think this sporadic behavior is a different bug; neither is predictive of the blank page behavior described here:

- ctrl-T -> either personalized home or a white blank screen -> go to mozilla.org in the location bar -> may or may not render blank

The blank tab also affects tabs open by context menu -> view source: the source code page is blank, but the inspector shows the DOM. It does not seem to affect firefox internals tabs like add-ons and troubleshooting information, but I have not tried this aggressively.

Closing out tabs seems to alleviate the problem, but it only seems to be positively correlated with, but not perfectly predicted by, the number of open tabs.

Restarting firefox does ameliorate this. However, I have not measured it systematically because I tend to have a private browsing window alongside a normal browsing window, each with many tabs. Restarting firefox removes all private tabs, and I prune the old tabs.

This is not fixed by the cleartype related discussions in other threads. Disabling add-ons on an already afflicted session does not change the behavior. I have not tried replicating the behavior with a clean slate, because it's hard to get a long-running working session with no addons.


Expected results:

New tabs should always render page content so it is visible to the user, resources permitted.

Comment 1

[xofer]

I believe I have the same issue. FF 63.0 on Ubuntu. With a lot of tabs, I'll get the "random" dead tabs when sometime 1) opening a new tab 2) opening a link in a new tab and 3) refocus a tab that hasn't been focused in a while.

It seems like the random bit has to do with which FF subprocess gets the request. I noticed that when this happens, one of the subprocesses has a core pegged. I can kill that subprocess (SIGTERM) and the problem goes away without crashing the browser -- just have to click "reload crashed tabs".

Comment 2

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

(In reply to xofer from comment #1)
> I noticed that when this happens, one of the subprocesses has a
> core pegged. I can kill that subprocess (SIGTERM) and the problem goes away
> without crashing the browser -- just have to click "reload crashed tabs".

If you're using the nvidia proprietary graphics drivers and putting the system to sleep, this might be bug 1492580.


Comment #0 is on Windows and predates that regression, so it's not that, but I wonder if bug 1488990 might be related.

Comment 3

[xofer]

(In reply to Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧ from comment #2)
> (In reply to xofer from comment #1)
> > I noticed that when this happens, one of the subprocesses has a
> > core pegged. I can kill that subprocess (SIGTERM) and the problem goes away
> > without crashing the browser -- just have to click "reload crashed tabs".
> 
> If you're using the nvidia proprietary graphics drivers and putting the
> system to sleep, this might be bug 1492580.

I am using nvidia proprietary drivers, but not sleeping. Doing fairly frequent user switching though.

Comment 4

[x-o-o]

I'll report that I have not experienced this issue starting maybe 4 months after the initial creation of this bug.

I currently am running 65.0.1 (64-bit) on the same machine where this issue was initially observed.

I consider the issue that affected me to be resolved, by observation.

Thanks

Comment 5

[xofer]

Also seems to be resolved for me, FF 64 and 65.0.1 on various versions of Ubuntu.

Comment 6

[andrey.glinski]

Have this problem for a year or so if not more. Sites open blank in new tab, some existing tabs turn blank as well.
No browser crashes are registered.
Pages do load, favicon and title ok and even links can be clicked, but the page is displayed blank.
It is always possible to open a page normally in any of the non-failed tabs, or to keep opening new tabs until you get a working one.

Using about:memory it is possible to confirm that all failed tabs belong to one content process.
Finding and killing it (and reloading the dead tabs) solves the problem.

To reproduce I need to keep FF open and actively used for days/weeks. Standby power mode is used daily.

Name Firefox
Version 71.0
Build ID 20191202093317
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0
OS Windows_NT 10.0

Comment 7

[wasseranomalie]

Attachment: Not loading tabs between working ones

Something like this happens for me since Firefox 72. If I start a browser instance and open 84 links from my bookmark toolbar, many tabs won't load at all (not even having a loading indicator for a short time). But this is not the only problem, if I now switch into such a tab, I can't switch to another tab anymore. Opening new tabs result in broken new tabs (I only see a new tab opening inside the URL bar, but the browser does not switch into it, it has also no selected-indicator). Many menu-items are also broken after his event (in most of the cases just nothing happens if clicking them). The only thing I can do to use the browser again is to restart it.

I've attached an image showing some working and some broken tabs (NotLoadingTabs.png). This image is from using Nightly to reproduce this issue (74.0a1 (2020-01-12) (64-Bit)). This always happens after opening these 84 tabs.

OS: Linux 64 Bit