1696590 - Repetitive Crash on Windows 10 x64 r600

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[SW_Dev]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:86.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/86.0

Steps to reproduce:

None.
Crash occurs spontaneously, even when no user is currently using Firefox or even using any other application of the computer (but with Firefox active, of course!)

Actual results:

• Crash then auto restart of Firefox.
• Crashes occur randomly, sometimes very close to each other, but the general average is once every 2 hours.
• Has been happening for over 6 months.
• No other application on the same machine behaves the same way, including other web browsers (namely Chrome and Edge; not sure about others)
• Crash is not linked to any browsing activity.
• No "that's embarrassing" crash screen is displayed
• No crash report is issued
• After automatic restart of FF, all tabs go back to where they ended up, but any form data that might have been filled is lost. Youtube videos reset to position 00:00.
• Checking FF crash reports (about:crashes) shows that these crashes were not recorded or reported.
• Several automatic FF updates were committed during this period of over 6 months
• A few Windows updates of were committed during this period of over 6 months

Expected results:

Continuous, trouble-free operation as it used to be for many several years.

Comment 1

[SW_Dev]

Attachment: Crash report shows that all crashes addressed by this bug report have not been counted or reported.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Win32' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 3

[Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel)]

There are some crashes from 2021, are those not from when this problem was happening?

Can you upload your about:support?

Can you try safe mode? Can you try a fresh profile? (I'm not suggesting this a solution but rather a debugging process to determine what is wrong)

Comment 4

[SW_Dev]

(In reply to Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel) from comment #3)

There are some crashes from 2021, are those not from when this problem was happening?

Can you upload your about:support?

Can you try safe mode? Can you try a fresh profile? (I'm not suggesting this a solution but rather a debugging process to determine what is wrong)

Thanks for your reply, Timothy.
Checked out about:support, and it seems to contain loads of stuff, and I'm not sure what most of it is! Could revealing this information publicly pose any harm to the security of my system or application?

Comment 5

[Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel)]

No, about:support is designed for exactly this purpose. You can remove the paths if you like.

Comment 6

[SW_Dev]

Attachment: Results rendered by "about:support"

Comment 7

[SW_Dev]

(In reply to Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel) from comment #5)

No, about:support is designed for exactly this purpose. You can remove the paths if you like.

Done--file uploaded

Comment 8

[Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel)]

You have enterprise policies active, does that sound right to you?
Your graphics drivers are from 2015, if there are newer ones try installing those.
You are using avast antivirus. This has in the past caused bad interactions with Firefox and is not necessary if you have the Microsoft security essentials installed, try disabling avast and see if the crashes go away.

Comment 9

[SW_Dev]

(In reply to Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel) from comment #8)

You have enterprise policies active, does that sound right to you?
Your graphics drivers are from 2015, if there are newer ones try installing those.
You are using avast antivirus. This has in the past caused bad interactions with Firefox and is not necessary if you have the Microsoft security essentials installed, try disabling avast and see if the crashes go away.

Thanks!
Nothing has changed, from my side, that might have started crashes, except:

1. Firefox updates
2. Windows updates
3. Antivirus updates (Avast, in my case)

wrt graphic drivers, I leave updates up to Windows. However, NO other apps at all, including other browsers and graphic-intensive apps (e.g., Photoshop, Microsoft Photos, and a couple of movie editors, seem to have any problems and crash, under same conditions, the way FF does.

wrt enterprise policies, I have no idea what this could be, and certainly never set it this way. Will try to disable it or change it to a lower setting.

Will comment as soon as a conclusion is reached.

Comment 10

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

It seems like a good place to start is to figure out why the crashes aren't showing up in about:crashes.

Comment 11

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

SW_Dev, can you try setting gfx.webrender.force-disabled=true and see if that helps?

Comment 12

[SW_Dev]

(In reply to Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel] from comment #11)

SW_Dev, can you try setting gfx.webrender.force-disabled=true and see if that helps?

Change made.
Will test and report back on results.

Comment 13

[SW_Dev]

Attachment: Firefox is up to date as of 2021-03-18.png

A screenshot of Firefox's "About"; to make sure no updates are missing by the time I'm leaving.

Comment 14

[SW_Dev]

Thanks to everybody who tried to help. Unfortunately, problem still persists, and again, nothing gets recorded in the crash log.

Sadly, I give up! It's probably time for me to fly away from Firefox--spent too much time over several months trying cope and/or to fix this problem, lost much more time re-typing forms that got interrupted because of crashes, not to mention the few times when crashes occurred right in the middle of a credit card payment!

I've been using Firefox for several good years as my "main" internet browser--namely ever since Netscape was retired. It was THE best browser (and I believe it still is--no kidding!). Other browsers (namely Chrome, Edge, and Opera--Safari was unusable) were used merely for testing my web applications before launch.

However, this is my reasoning for the decision:

• Tried checks and fixes suggested by experts through this particular ticket/bug report (or at least most of them)
• Tried running Firefox in "Safe mode"
• Tried running Firefox in "Safe mode" + avoided graphic-intensive pages; namely websites with videos and/or heavy animations(!!)
• Tried a Firefox hard reset (refresh Firefox)
• Gone through Firefox automatic updates several times since the beginning of the problem several months ago.

Please take into consideration that:

• Firefox is the only browser behaving this way amongst other browsers tested on my computer (namely Edge, Chrome, and Opera)
• Firefox is the only application behaving this way amongst all other applications installed on my computer (and I do have quite a LOT of these!)

As a tribute to my beloved Firefox, I will consider, in the near future, a screen recording illustrating crash and restart; hopefully this will help figure out what happens. Also FF-generated reports will be generated upon request (requestor might need to tell me how to obtain them, though!). However, I might not be able to conduct further tests. Will check back on Firefox in a few months' time--hopefully the problem will be solved by then.

Comment 15

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Sorry we couldn't help.

Comment 16

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

This is the kind of crash we should be able to capture using WER.

Comment 17

[SW_Dev]

(In reply to Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] from comment #16)

This is the kind of crash we should be able to capture using WER.

Please elaborate. Thanks.

Comment 18

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

In comment 0 you mentioned that the crash reporter doesn't show up when Firefox crashes. This happens for certain class of crashes that our current crash reporting infrastructure is unable to intercept: __fastfail() exceptions, catastrophic stack corruption and often crashes caused by injected DLLs. Bug 1682507 tracks work that will leverage Windows Error Reporting facilities to intercept and report those elusive crashes. It should be available in nightly by the end of this week so I encourage you to try it when it lands and see if the crashes are reported correctly.

Comment 19

[SW_Dev]

(In reply to Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] from comment #18)

In comment 0 you mentioned that the crash reporter doesn't show up when Firefox crashes. This happens for certain class of crashes that our current crash reporting infrastructure is unable to intercept: __fastfail() exceptions, catastrophic stack corruption and often crashes caused by injected DLLs. Bug 1682507 tracks work that will leverage Windows Error Reporting facilities to intercept and report those elusive crashes. It should be available in nightly by the end of this week so I encourage you to try it when it lands and see if the crashes are reported correctly.

Thanks for the explanation and update of bug reporting efforts.
However, I reiterate that with every crash, FF restarted itself automatically. It's hard to understand how FF was able to conduct a post-crash action (i.e., restart itself), while it failed to log the crash event. Will check on the update, though.

Comment 20

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

(In reply to SW_Dev from comment #19)

However, I reiterate that with every crash, FF restarted itself automatically. It's hard to understand how FF was able to conduct a post-crash action (i.e., restart itself), while it failed to log the crash event. Will check on the update, though.

That is particularly odd, however if a crash is happening we'll be able to intercept it so at the very least it will show up in about:crashes after Firefox restarts.

Comment 21

[SW_Dev]

Updates:

1. Down to the latest FF update, about:crash still does not log any of the crashes addressed by this bug report.
2. I have reasons to suspect Avast as one of reasons behind the mysterious crash/restart. I'm attaching two Avast threat detection pop-up screens that were generated in one event. As a matter of fact, Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel) had early had this suspicion and suggested turning off Avast, but regretfully I could not give up the antivirus and suffice with Windows protection.

Experts' input is much appreciated.

Comment 22

[SW_Dev]

Attachment: FF installed version

Comment 23

[SW_Dev]

Attachment: Avast-Firefox-Crash-1-of-2.png

Comment 24

[SW_Dev]

Attachment: Avast-Firefox-Crash-2-of-2.png

Comment 25

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

Is this issue still happening for you?

Comment 26

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

Closing this because it isn't actionable. Now that we have WER support however I suspect that this type of crashes will be reported and show under about:crashes correctly.