1984807 - Animated new tab wallpaper results in memory leak when Firefox is minimized

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect, P3)

Description

[Orofil]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:142.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/142.0

Steps to reproduce:

Through the customize menu in the Firefox new tab page, I uploaded a .gif file as the new wallpaper for that page. Then I minimized Firefox.

Actual results:

The Windows Resource Monitor showed that Firefox's working set memory usage began to increase until it used all available memory. In the task manager this can be seen in the total amount of used memory, but not directly in the Firefox process. This seems to be similar to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1828587

Expected results:

Firefox's memory usage should not increase when minimized while the new tab page has an animated background. Everything works as expected when the background is not animated.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Ina Popescu, Desktop QA]

I tested on Windows 10 with Firefox 142.0.1 but didn’t see memory increase when minimizing with a GIF wallpaper. Could you provide some additional details to help investigate:

• Does the issue still occur in Safe Mode?
• Does it happen with a new Firefox profile?
• Does it happen every time Firefox is minimized or intermittently?
• Is only one new tab with the animated wallpaper open when the issue occurs?
• Does the issue occur with any animated GIF or only specific ones(attach the file if possible)?

Comment 3

[Orofil]

(In reply to Ina Popescu, Desktop QA from comment #2)

I tested on Windows 10 with Firefox 142.0.1 but didn’t see memory increase when minimizing with a GIF wallpaper. Could you provide some additional details to help investigate:

• Does the issue still occur in Safe Mode?
• Does it happen with a new Firefox profile?
• Does it happen every time Firefox is minimized or intermittently?
• Is only one new tab with the animated wallpaper open when the issue occurs?
• Does the issue occur with any animated GIF or only specific ones(attach the file if possible)?

Yes, it occurs in Safe Mode, with a new Firefox profile, every time Firefox is minimized, and with or without a tab with the animated wallpaper open. It seems to occur with any animated GIF, for example this one. Also, I'm using Windows 11 version 24H2.

Comment 4

[Ina Popescu, Desktop QA]

I gave it another try on Windows 10 using the provided GIF, but the issue was not reproducible with Firefox 143.0 and there was no noticeable memory leak. I currently don’t have access to a Windows 11 setup to test there, so I’m waiting for developer input for the time being.

Comment 5

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

I have been debugging this a bit in bug 1991327.

I have not had much luck reproducing it consistently. I can see a memory spike, but it usually stabilizes at some point. I don't think that's good and I suspect is connected to the main issue causing a crash.

I'm testing a solution where the wallpaper is not used until visible. I suspect it'll fix it by just outright removing the issue. But it's weird it happens and I think there is a deeper issues here. Also by hiding it until visible, we get a noticeable flash of no wallpaper one opening a newtab.