1864282 - Neopets Explore page freezes Firefox Android and sometimes Android SystemUI as well

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Fenix :: Browser Engine, defect)

Description

[Mateus Rodrigues Costa]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0

Steps to reproduce:

Basically accessed https://www.neopets.com/explore.phtml.

Neopets is not the only website that seems to be affected, loading a Twitter profile with several videos in the first page using Nitter with hsl streaming causes a similar effect.

Which effectively means that loading several elements at once could be at fault.

Device is a Galaxy A22 running Android 13.

Actual results:

Firefox android Freeze, causing SystemUI freeze

Expected results:

No freezes.

Comment 1

[Mihai Adrian Carare [:mcarare]]

I cannot reproduce this on a Pixel 4 with Android 13.
@Mateus Rodrigues Costa Does this still occur? Were you experiencing network issues when this happened?

Adding QA request for confirmation.

Comment 2

[Lorand Janos]

Tried reproducing on the following devices, without success:

• LG Nexus 5 (Android 6.0.1);
• Huawei P20 (Android 10);
• Google Pixel 4 (Android 13);
• Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (Android 13);
• Google Pixel 7 (Android 14).

I managed to reproduce some sort of crash on a Xiaomi Redmi 9C NFC (Android 10) while trying to scroll down while the map is loading.
The crash is strange as it doesn't send any report, and it just sends the app in the background with a start on homepage when it's returned.

Comment 3

[Mateus Rodrigues Costa]

I believe this to be caused due to Android's native OoM killing.

Essentially my device (Galaxy A22) is between low end to intermediate and doesn't have a lot of RAM. That combined with the fact that I always have more than 100+ tabs open at once could likely cause this issue.

This being caused by memory also would explain why it didn't work on several of the high end phones tested.

Comment 4

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

The bug has a release status flag that shows some version of Firefox is affected, thus it will be considered confirmed.

Comment 5

[jisakiel]

For what it's worth I've been tracking this as well. Happens to me on 2023-12 patch for a Pixel 6, with 119 and 120.1.1. I'd say it's been happening since Android 14 update, or at least the 2023-11 patch level. SystemUI responsiveness is impacted (as in, if I try gestures to move out of the window I see visible lag). I have a decent amount of open tabs, with few "active", syncing is enabled on them, a few very common extensions. Disabling accessibility services hasn't helped either.

The very system becomes unresponsive, typically when taking an action on Firefox (rather than browsing the page) i.e. switching tabs or tapping on address box.

SystemUI impact strongly suggest there's an Android component to this, and the end result seems like Firefox being evicted, since pages do visibly reload on the following open of it, sometimes losing the last open tab. However, memory usage stats show it under control, and about:crashes does not show it crashing (so it suggests Android onSave might be skipped out of being busy, but without resulting in a full crash somehow? since I don't get any notification).

I'll try to gather adb logs etc. For what it's worth it looks remotely similar to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1813899

Comment 6

[Mateus Rodrigues Costa]

Maybe this is related to https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/301833859 ?

I did also notice that frequently on my phone recently if I just as much as switch apps then Firefox gets killed very often in the background, even when there's a form with some data filled in (in which case it becomes extremely annoying).

So I guess it could really be that Google pushed an ART update to Android 12+ users via Google Play system updates with problems in the GC.

Apparently the fix will only be available in January though.

Comment 7

[Mateus Rodrigues Costa]

Hi, any update on what could be causing the bug?

Should I wait for the GC fix in the January GPSU? Apparently it should be already rolling and will be fully rolled out at the end of the month.

Comment 8

[Jonathan Almeida [:jonalmeida]]

I don't have any update to share, sorry.

Comment 9

[Mateus Rodrigues Costa]

Seems Firefox mobile still can't load the Neopets Explore page, although it has no issue on basically no other page (not even on each world page).
What seems to have changed is that now it doesn't crash anymore, which might have been related to the GPSU ART update from several months back.

Comment 10

[Jeff Boek [:boek]]

Going to clear out the severity on this so it will come back up in triage

Comment 11

[Mateus Rodrigues Costa]

I investigated this a bit further.

The Neopets Explore page was a easy way to cause the crash cause by the ART bug from a few months back.

So, it turns out that the underlying bug here is that Firefox Android misbehaves on how it understands the HTML and CSS.
I'm not sure if before it had other loading problems aside from the crash, but looking today (with current Chrome and Firefox), it seems Firefox understands the page should be way wider than needed compared to Chrome.

I will close this issue and open a new issue about this soon.