1866624 - Freezes of browser and Android in Firefox 120

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1864557

(Fenix :: General, defect, P2)

Description

[Sam Tuke]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Open Firefox android
Type any URL
Wait for it to load

Actual results:

Page doesn't load
Firefox freezes
Android freezes and is completely unresponsive for a few seconds
Firefox crashes / closes
Android becomes responsive again

Expected results:

We page should have loaded in Firefox as usual

(FYI I'm reporting this in Chrome as doing so in Firefox is currently not possible due to to this problem).

Comment 1

[Kim Lindberger [:talyz]]

I have the same issue on my OnePlus 9 Pro running Android 13. Just browsing already open tabs works fine, but as soon as you start typing a new url, either by opening a new tab or reusing an existing on, Firefox crawls to a halt and is eventually killed along with the rest of the UI. I downloaded Firefox Beta and that works, so either the bug has been fixed or it's dependent on something specific in the state/data.

Comment 2

[halletienne]

I am exposed to the same issue. It seems that it happens more often when I have heavy apps opened on the side.
I will try to get some logs later

Comment 3

[Jonathan Almeida [:jonalmeida]]

Hey Sam, thanks for reporting! Could you try out something for us to help debug this issue?

Can you check to see if 'Enable Firefox Suggest' is toggled on in Secret Settings? You can unlock the Secret Settings page by going to Settings -> About Firefox Fenix -> tap on the logo at the top 5 times.

If it is on, can you turn it off and see if that improve your situation?

Comment 4

[Sam Tuke]

@jonathan Yes but I don't see that settings (after enabling secret settings). This is the settings page I see.

Comment 5

[Sam Tuke]

Attachment: Screenshot_20231208_103840_Firefox.jpg

Comment 6

[Jonathan Almeida [:jonalmeida]]

You should be able to see the setting in 'Secret Settings'. It's between 'About Firefox' and 'Secret Debug Info' at the bottom of your screenshot.

Out of an abundance of caution, we have remotely turned off the Firefox Suggest feature, so you should see this flag disabled now. If you see improvements, could you try to then enable it and see if it gets worse again? That would still help us verify that this feature is affecting application performance.

Thanks again!

Comment 7

[Jan-Ivar Bruaroey [:jib] (needinfo? me)]

Hi (I filed bug 1864557) — Firefox Nightly (122.0a1) still crashes for me after one second every single time I type a single character into the URL bar, rendering it unusable. Firefox release (120) and geckoview example are fine for me for some reason.

I've turned off everything in the Secret Settings (which for me meant turning off "Enable Firefox Suggest" and "Enable tabs Tray to Compose rewrite"), but it didn't help.

Happy to try mozregression or getting logs if someone can help me with how.

Comment 8

[Adam Holland]

I've been having likely the same issue, on a Moto G 5G Plus, Android 11. "Enable Firefox Suggest" is not enabled.

Symptoms are on of:

• Firefox stops responding, the the OS stops responding. After a few minutes Firefox is closed and the OS comes back to normal (this is the most frequently occurring of the three).
• Firefox starts rapidly getting slower and slower, and if you're lucky you can close it normally before it brings everything else down.
• Android displays a not responding message, and allows Firefox to be closed.

No clear pattern to it. Seems to usually happen when opening a new page, or shortly afterwards. Sometimes it will run for 10-30 minutes without freezing, other times it will repeatedly freeze trying to open a single page after startup, and anywhere in between.

Also happy to try collecting more information.

Comment 9

[Jonathan Almeida [:jonalmeida]]

Hey Adam! If you could help us out, that would be grand.

Could you try to extract a performance profile from your device with the 'Firefox' (and maybe a separate once with 'Graphics'?) soon before you think firefox is going to stop responding? You can find instructions on how to do that at the link here.

My thoughts around that are maybe there is something that is increasingly taking on more memory over time, and while we won't see a memory size of the increase from the profiles, we could try to gather what is being executed that might be allocating all this memory.

Thank you in advance! If you prefer more help with this in near-real time our team is available on chat.mozilla.org in the #fenix:mozilla.org channel during most of the EU/North American working hours.

Comment 10

[thor]

It took me at least 10 tries, but the profile is crashing as well: https://profiler.firefox.com/public/r6wx8sn5tyj2kk4v9h01rbadftbw5akh6jhrq5g

You gotta be fast!

Comment 11

[vilim]

Firefox on mobile is unusable for me since this freeze (I was on the beta, when it started freezing I switched to the regular channel, then it started freezing and crashing and I was forced to move to Chrome). I can reproduce the freeze pretty consistently by typing something in the address bar and searching (as opposed to tapping an autocompleted URL).

Comment 12

[Sam Tuke]

Yup still affecting me too

Comment 13

[vilim]

On Firefox 121.1 this bug persists. I tried obtaining a profile, but because of the crash I don't get the profile upload dialog.
It usually appears after typing a search string into the URL bar, not when auto-completing to a bookmark or a history page.

Comment 14

[Mira Lobontiu (Android QA)]

Closing this ticket as a duplicate of Bug 1864557.