1720988 - FF 90.0 webpage rendering broken (random black areas) with older/vintage laptops (MacBook & Acer) with ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (was ok still with FF 89.1.2)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[hollmeer]

Attachment: ff90-render-failure.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/90.0

Steps to reproduce:

After recent normal software update/upgrade in old macbook and acer laptops with ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, the FF was upgraded from 89.1.2 to FF 90.0

Tested our webpage at https://www.crosshelix.com for curiosity, if an annoying bug of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1664798 was perhaps fixed, but instead find another surprise, which wasn't there with any older FF relases (the latest working one was FF 89.1.2 prior to upgrade to apparrently (?) broken FF 90.0

Actual results:

Discovered immediately after page load that the page's rendering leaves arbitrary black areas (no other rendering, but black) outside the area, which has a webGL animation canvas at the background (which covers just a portion of the screen of the webpage) . Rendering is always ok within the area of the background webGL canvas. The page renders other layers on top of the background, which seems to fail with old/vintage laptops (Macbook & Acer tested, which both fail).

Interestingly, tested a Raspberry PI 4, which has no problems at all, so the rendering seems broken perhaps with old wintage hardware only, even if there is well enough other resources but processor cores & power, and lesser powerfull graphics chips.

However, as said, there was no such problems with FF 89.1.2 or any earlier.

Expected results:

Should render the entire page as expected, and as rendered in e.g. FF 89.1.2 release-

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[hollmeer]

(In reply to Release mgmt bot [:sylvestre / :calixte / :marco for bugbug] from comment #1)

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

I'm supposing that the webGL canvas IS NOT THE PROBLEM, as the animation seems to render without problems, and the other layers with higher z-index seem to render correctly with JS-script-driven pulsating opacity for such layers.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE IMAGES, AND THE JS-GENERATED RANDOM AND RANDOMLY MOVING TEXT-ELEMENTS DO NOT RENDER CORRECTLY OVER THE ENTIRE PAGE (OUTSIDE THE AREA OF the webGL canvas), BUT LEAVES ARBITRARY FLICKERING BLACK AREAS FOR SUCH ELEMENTS TO BE RENDERED.

It seems, however, that some other text an image elements are rendered correctly even over such randomly black areas.

Comment 3

[hollmeer]

As my rather new Android phone (4GB mem, 8 cores etc) has now also updated to FF 90.1.1 Build #2015820747, the same random flickering of black areas of the image & floating html-text layers - outside the area of the webGL animation canvas - occur, while browsing the referred webpage..

..So obviously..

NOT JUST A RENDERING PROBLEM WITH VINTAGE HW

Comment 4

[hollmeer]

It seems that the weird random flickering of the random-shaped black areas of image-layers is still with us in FF 90.1.3 build #2015824995 in Android 10 phone. It seems like the render cycle leaves arbitrary areas of such image-layer(s) just black, although some other html-elements/layers are rendered as expected into/over such black/faulty-rendered areas.

Comment 5

[barath]

I just started getting these black boxes (if they're the same...) on 90.0.2 (64-bit) on openSUSE tumbleweed. I have tried disabling and enabling the various HW acceleration options, to no avail. Running kde with mesa amd amdgpu.

I mostly notice them when slowly scrolling down stories on hacker news.

Comment 6

[hollmeer]

just upgraded to FF 91.0 in both legacy boxes (MacBook & Acer) and this reported problem seems GONE. The referred page seems to render correctly.

Comment 7

[hollmeer]

it seems that this render problem is GONE also with upgrade to FF 91.1.0 build #2015826187 in Android 10 Phone.

Comment 8

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Thanks for confirming the fix. Sorry we didn't get to this earlier, I'll still move this into the right component so the triage bot doesn't repeat its mistake.