1677534 - Errors while process switching have bad UX

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect, P3)

Description

[Nika Layzell [:nika] (ni? for response)]

While looking into bug 1670557, I tried testing the error case which I thought probably lead to that particular crash, which is probably caused by an error launching a content process while process switching.

I ended up discovering from this that the UX for these errors (such as errors returned from CanonicalBrowsingContext::ChangeRemoteness) are really bad. Namely, the load throbber will continue indefinitely, and no progress will be made to load the webpage you requested.

We should probably make sure to improve this UX in some way or another. In the case where the error is recoverable, we'd probably ideally recover and continue as before, but in the case where it's not, we should perhaps navigate to a tab crashed page or similar.

Comment 1

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

We should fix this bug, but downgrading from S2 to S3 because it's not serious.

Comment 2

[Neha Kochar [:neha]]

This will likely be made easier by BFCache+Fission work but somewhat low priority for now.

Comment 3

[Neha Kochar [:neha]]

Won't block Release experiments but still something that we'd like to fix. Moving to MVP for hopefully finding time to fix it.

Comment 4

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Nika says this error and failure scenario is mostly theoretical and doesn't need to block Fission MVP. Moving this bug to Fission Future.