1871524 - Stuck at tabswitch spinner when opening a new tab

Status: NEW

(Core :: Graphics, defect, P2)

Description

[eight04]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:123.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open any page.
2. Select some text, drag-n-drop the selection to the tab bar.
3. A tab (googling the selection) is opened in the background.
4. Wait until the tab is loaded.
5. Switch to the new tab.

Actual results:

https://imgsh.net/a/rNrg8hc.png
The tab stuck at the loading animation.

The page is actually loaded, you can interact with the page via mouse/keyboard as seen in the screenshot.

Expected results:

Just show the page normally.

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Tabbed Browser' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Hello, thank you for the bug report!
Unfortunately I could not reproduce your issue. Would you be so kind as to answer a few questions so we can investigate this further?

• Does this issue happen with a new profile? Here is a link on how to create one: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles
• Does this issue happen when Firefox is in Troubleshoot Mode? Here’s a link on how to enable it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode#w_how-to-start-firefox-in-troubleshoot-mode

Thank you.

Comment 3

[eight04]

(In reply to Ardelean Oana, Desktop QA [:oardelean] from comment #2)

• Does this issue happen with a new profile? Here is a link on how to create one: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles
• Does this issue happen when Firefox is in Troubleshoot Mode? Here’s a link on how to enable it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode#w_how-to-start-firefox-in-troubleshoot-mode

Tested it again. Now I'm not able to reproduce this issue anymore.

Tested on my original profile, a new profile, and my original profile with trouble shoot mode.

Comment 4

[eight04]

Saw this bug again today.

I middle-clicked a Google search result.
Later I switched to that tab, the tab stuck at the loading animation. (while you can still interact with the page)

BUT before I submitted this comment (probably in one minute), I checked the tab again and the page was shown correctly.

Comment 5

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:dao, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 6

[eight04]

Saw this bug again.

1. I noticed one tab was stuck.
2. After a while, I checked the tab again and found that it was still stuck.
3. I pressed the "Print Screen" key to take a screenshot with PicPick.
4. After the screenshot was taken, PicPick opened the image editor.
5. I minimized the image editor and the tab loaded correctly.

Comment 7

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Hy :eight04, thank you so much for the additional information!
I could reproduce this issue on Firefox Nightly 123.0a1 on Ubuntu 22 so far. I used the STR provided by the reporter until I caught the issue.
Please note that this issue is intermittent and does not reproduce reliably.
Setting as NEW so the developing team can have a look.

Comment 8

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hi eight04,

Thanks for continuing to provide feedback here. I think the next thing we need here is a performance profile recording to get a deeper sense of what might be going wrong.

If you follow the instructions at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/reporting_a_performance_problem.html, it will guide you through enabling the profiler button in Firefox and starting a recording. Once recording, you can keep it on in the background until you see the issue (it uses a circular buffer). Once you see the issue, hit the button again, and a new tab will open with the profile that was collected. There are instructions here on how to upload and share the profile here in this bug, and then we can examine it.

Comment 9

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️) from comment #8)

Hi eight04,

Thanks for continuing to provide feedback here. I think the next thing we need here is a performance profile recording to get a deeper sense of what might be going wrong.

QA may also be able to help with this as they managed to reproduce the issue.

Comment 10

[eight04]

Saw this bug again. Unfortunately I didn't run the profiler at browser start so the report only includes the loading screen I saw.
https://share.firefox.dev/48YGZFF

At 50s, I minimized the window and maximize it again, which fixed the issue.

Comment 11

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Thanks for the profile, eight04.

From examining the profile, what I see is that the Twitter page (during the recording of the profile) never seems to have its refresh driver tick / WebRender display list upload until the window is restored. I'm going to move this bug over to Core :: Graphics for now.

Comment 12

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

I also managed to capture a profile of the issue. Note that the bug was caught towards the end. Please let me know if the profile is usable and if there’s anything else I can help with.
Profile: https://share.firefox.dev/4bA0Yfh

Comment 13

[Bas Schouten (:bas.schouten)]

The Performance Impact Calculator has determined this bug's performance impact to be medium. If you'd like to request re-triage, you can reset the Performance Impact flag to "?" or needinfo the triage sheriff.

Platforms: Windows
Impact on site: Renders site effectively unusable
Configuration: Rare
Websites affected: Major
[x] Able to reproduce locally

Comment 14

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Thanks oardelean,

From what I can tell, your profile is similar to eight04's - we tab switch, and request displaylists from the underlying tab, but they never arrive or get composited, so we hit our timeout and show the spinner.

oardelean and eight04, can you please visit about:support and click "Copy text to clipboard" and paste your clipboard into a new comment in this bug? I want to look for commonalities in your graphics stack.

Comment 15

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Attachment: about_support.txt

Comment 16

[eight04]

Attachment: about:support

```

Comment 17

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hm. Nothing is jumping out from those about:supports that might explain this.

oardelean - how reliabily can you reproduce this? Are you able to get a regression range?

Comment 18

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a regression range. This particular bug is quite tricky to catch - most of the times it does not reproduce, and when it does, the browser sometimes tends to freeze for a short while, which makes it difficult to come with a correct regression range. I was only able to reproduce once on today’s Nightly build(using the same profile which has the about:support attached), but had no success whatsoever on older builds.

Comment 19

[eight04]

Got a similar tab today, without the spinner.
https://imgur.com/iAh6nN6

This time, minimizing & maximizing the window doesn't fix it.

Here is the log from the browser console:
https://imgur.com/tlrFvn6

There are some sendAsyncMessage errors. Don't know if it's relevant.

Comment 20

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:bhood, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 22

[ProFire88]

Attachment: Spinner is forever loading when restoring tab. Doesn't affect all tabs.

Comment 23

[ProFire88]

Attachment: This page is forever spinning after restoring tab

Comment 24

[ProFire88]

Attachment: Spinner forever

Comment 25

[ProFire88]

Attachment: Another incident of page forever loading

Comment 26

[unkkkkkk]

Tab preview feature causes this bug from v131.0.
Issue gone by disabling below in about:config.

browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled = false
browser.tabs.hoverPreview.showThumbnails = false

Comment 27

[ProFire88]

Thank you. I'm going to try this setting over a few days and see if this issue occurs or not.
Since it's a bug, I presume it's on the roadmap to be fixed sometime in the future?

Comment 28

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

We don't currently have enough information to reproduce this particular bug. If you can confirm that disabling tab hover previews fixes the issue for yourself, that gives us an extra clue, but we still need to determine why it's happening and then how to fix it - and we may need information from you after you've done this check.

Comment 29

[ProFire88]

Attachment: Issue persist despite disabling tab hover previews

The issue still persist.

I confirm that in my about:config, browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled and browser.tabs.hoverPreview.showThumbnails is toggled to false. I've also restarted the browser to ensure the configuration took effect before the video recording.