367737 - Talkback extension causes slow OpenGL in plugins

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: Talkback Client, defect)

Description

[Aras Pranckevicius]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1

OpenGL is very slow in a browser plugi9n, much slower than the equivalent plugin on IE - to the point where it's pretty much unusable.

This happens on various hardware configurations - various graphics cards by various IHVs and various drivers. Profiling tells that wglMakeCurrent is taking ages (5-15ms) on Firefox, whereas it takes well under a millisecond on IE (ActiveX plugin) or Opera (the same NPAPI plugin that is used on Firefox).

When stepping through assembly calls in IE and Firefox case, I noticed that in Firefox plugin calls such as SetPixelFormat, wglMakeCurrent call into fullsoft.dll (part of Talkback).

When Talkback is disabled, OpenGL is as fast as on IE. When Talkback is enabled, OpenGL is awfully slow. I don't know what Talkback does, but it's clearly something wrong. And the fact that it's installed by default does not help either...

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a minimal plugin that just initializes OpenGL, and activates context, clears background and swaps buffers each frame.

See the attachment for the plugin binary + source (and equivalent ActiveX control for IE).
Actual Results:  
Talkback enabled = OpenGL is slow.
Talkback disabled = OpenGL is fast.

Expected Results:  
Talkback should not interfere with plugins; my thinking is that it should only install an exception filter or something. Now it causes serious slow downs.

Comment 1

[Aras Pranckevicius]

Attachment: Minimal plugin that uses OpenGL

Binaries + source of NPAPI plugin and ActiveX control that shows the problem. Read readme.txt inside.

Comment 2

[Aras Pranckevicius]

Just to share some perspective from my POV: I'd like either Talkback be fixed as soon as possible; or get any information about possible workarounds. Is it possible to do something so that Talkback does not inject it's code (or whatever it's doing) for my window procedures? Disable Talkback from the plugin altogether? Disable it somehow while installing our own plugin?

Because right now all we can do is tell our customers is "don't use Firefox on windows" instead redirecting them to IE or Opera, or telling them to disable Talkback.

Comment 3

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Talkback isn't used anymore:
R.Invalid now.