689072 - [OOPP] Flash plugin can crash reloading a page if a persona is installed, sometimes (rarely) hanging the browser

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:8.0a2) Gecko/20110924 Firefox/8.0a2 ID:20110924042014

If the user has been installed a Persona and is trying to work with Vidyo Firefox completely freezes. I have seen this today and was able to reduce my profile as much as possible, so that only the Personas information in the prefs.js remained. I haven't tested on other platforms yet.

Steps:
1. Create a fresh profile
2. Install any Persona, e.g. http://www.getpersonas.com/de/persona/429470
3. Open the URL
4. Login via a guest
5. Reload the page
6. Repeat step 4 and 5 if necessary

At least after a second attempt Firefox always freezes for me and needs to be force closed. Removing the Persona I don't see the problem anymore.

Thankfully this issue cannot be reproduced in the Firefox 7.0 release candidate build. It regressed in Aurora at some time. I think it's something we should investigate and fix before we build the first Firefox 8.0 beta. Asking for tracking Firefox 8.

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

I have to add that you shouldn't have running the Vidyo client on the desktop to see this freeze.

Comment 2

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I don't use Vidyo, so I'm going to need to figure out how -- not least what client I should install, and where I should get it.

Any pointers?  A quick Google search for "vidyo site:mozilla.org" didn't turn up anything useful.

Comment 3

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

MoCo employees can install it via https://intranet.mozilla.org/Vidyo

Comment 4

[David Burns :automatedtester]

I have managed to recreate this just by reloading the page. I did steps:

1,2,3 and 5. When I did step 5 then the browser window disappeared. The plugin-container was frozen, so when I force quit that the browser process died.

Comment 5

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I wonder what happens in 32-bit mode (when the Vidyo plugin will presumably run in-process).

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

32bit mode works pretty fine. I was not able to freeze Firefox. So it seems to be an out of process issue. CC'ing Benjamin and moving the right product/component.

Comment 7

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

(In reply to David Burns :automatedtester from comment #4)
> 1,2,3 and 5. When I did step 5 then the browser window disappeared. The
> plugin-container was frozen, so when I force quit that the browser process
> died.

In such a case it should not be related to Vidyo but Flash, because the Vidyo is a desktop application and does not run as plugin. The Flash page communicates to the external process only.

So what I have on my system is:

    File: Flash Player.plugin
    Version: 10.3.183.10
    Shockwave Flash 10.3 r183

Comment 8

[Vlad [QA]]

Attachment: screenshot

WFM on Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:8.0a2) Gecko/20110926 Firefox/8.0a2
I have repeated steps 4 and 5 numerous times and in 9 out of 10 times I got the Vidyo client (see screenshot) but no crash or freeze and in 1 out of 10 times, I got a "Disconnected by operator" error but still no crash or freeze.

WFM also on Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:9.0a1) Gecko/20110925 Firefox/9.0a1 
I got no " Disconnected by operator" error only the Vidyo client - still no crashes or freezes.

Comment 9

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Please see comment 1. The Vidyo desktop client must be closed to reproduce this freeze.

Comment 10

[u279076]

I am seeing a similar issue with Firefox 6.0.2 bundled in Ubuntu. I don't have a persona installed. If I let Firefox do it's thing while hung, it usually recovers after a couple of minutes. The problem seems more exaggerated if I have Flash loaded in other tabs (ie. Youtube).

Comment 11

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Regressed between 2011-08-16-04-20-10 and 2011-08-17-04-20-04:

PASS: http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/rev/d80597c09388
FAIL: http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/rev/246acc814f72

Pushlog: http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/pushloghtml?fromchange=d80597c09388&tochange=246acc814f72

Ok, so that is pretty useless because that's the full merge from mozilla-central. I should better re-check the regression range with Nightly builds.

Comment 12

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Regressed between 2011-07-13-03-07-41 and 2011-07-14-03-07-48 on mozilla-central:

PASS: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/931f06b80727
FAIL: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/34b0b3bc6984

Pushlog: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=931f06b80727&tochange=34b0b3bc6984

Could that be related to bug 663259? I can't find any other obvious check-in that day. Ben and Steven, could one of you have a quick look? Otherwise I will have to run a hg-bisect. Thanks.

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Btw, the todays Nightly build works and doens't show the problem anymore:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:10.0a1) Gecko/20110929 Firefox/10.0a1

Comment 14

[LegNeato]

---------------------------------[ Triage Comment ]---------------------------------

We need to figure out what is going on here for Firefox 8 (or if we even care). We may back out bug 663259, which may fix this issue but we should track this until we know for sure.

Comment 15

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

(In reply to Christian Legnitto [:LegNeato] from comment #14)
> We need to figure out what is going on here for Firefox 8 (or if we even
> care). We may back out bug 663259, which may fix this issue but we should
> track this until we know for sure.

With the latest beta of Firefox 8 the flash plugin is crashing for me after the attempt to reload the page. That forces a reload of the page and does not trigger the hang for me. But I'm not sure if that would fix the issue for everyone.

Comment 16

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

Sorry this fell under my radar.

The changes in bug 663259 can be pref-ed of by setting 'plugins.use_layers=false'. This resolves the problem in this bug while regressing the async drawing feature.

I can reproduce this issue with FF8 Beta but not with aurora/my trunk debug build. We don't seem to need a fix for this on trunk/aurora thus if I make a patch for this it would be specifically for the Beta branch.

Are we willing to take a fix for this or do we rather pref off bug 663259?

Comment 17

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

With my setup, the Vidyo Desktop always fails to launch even when I have no persona installed.  I tested on OS X 10.6.8 with FF 7.0.1 and today's mozilla-central nightly.  My version of the Vidyo Desktop is (I think) the current one (2.1.0).  So is my version of the Flash plugin (11.0.1.152).

The Flash plugin does launch (in plugin-container), and doesn't crash.  But it appears that the Vidyo Desktop never launches (there's no evidence that it launches and then crashes or quits).

So I'm not sure this is our bug any more -- that there's anything we can do about this problem in its current state.

Comment 18

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I get the same results in 32-bit-mode FF, and in Safari.

Comment 19

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

(In reply to Steven Michaud from comment #17)
I think that's intended behavior. I believe you're supposed to start vidyo manually.

Without having vidyo running but with a persona you should be able to reproduce the problem on FF 8.0 beta.

Comment 20

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Isn't that a contradiction?

If you start vidyo manually, then it's running :-)

Comment 21

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I can now sort-of reproduce this bug with the following two nightlies,
and those dated between them, but not with earlier or later nightlies:

firefox-2011-07-14-03-07-48-mozilla-central
firefox-2011-08-21-03-07-58-mozilla-central

I can also reproduce it in all four 8.0 betas.	

I can't reproduce it anywhere if I set plugins.use_layers to false.
So Benoit's backout patch for bug 663259 should take care of FF8.

For FF9 I think we should consider this bug WFM.

Comment 22

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

The first thing to understand about this bug is that it has *nothing*
to do with Vidyo.  It didn't make any sense to me until I understood
that.

Instead it seems to be a bad interaction between FF (when a persona is
installed) and the Flash plugin, if the Flash plugin is running
out-of-process.  It may also be triggered by something the page(s) at
https://v.mozilla.com/ do.

(Note that to run Flash in-process, you have to switch the distro to
32-bit mode and also set dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.i386.flash
player.plugin to false.)

Here's how I reproduce this bug:

1) Install the persona from comment #0
   (http://www.getpersonas.com/de/persona/429470) if it hasn't already
   been installed.

2) Clear the network cache.  I find this makes the bug easier to
   reproduce.

   a) Go to Preferences : Advanced : Network and click on the Clear
      Now button.

   It may also help to run "purge" at a Terminal prompt.

3) Visit this bug's URL
   (https://v.mozilla.com/flex.html?roomdirect.html&key=csVP8jSvLR2U).

4) Type "guest" in the Guest Name box and click the Join button.

5) Wait for the Vidyo Desktop to fail to start -- you'll see a page
   with an error message starting "VidyoDesktop 2.x isn't running".

6) Reload the page using Command-r.

   Here I occasionally see the spinning "hang" cursor, but usually
   only for a few seconds.

   However the Flash plugin almost always crashes.  You may or may not
   see the dead plugin icon.  But (when the plugin crashes) you'll
   always see a blank gray page (instead of the normal Vidyo login
   page).

Steps 4 and 5 aren't really necessary.  The Flash plugin almost always
crashes without them.

Comment 23

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

It's not easy to tell which patch "fixed" this bug -- it's not at all obvious from looking at the list of patches that are "new" in the 2011-08-22 nightly.  Nor do I have any idea why installing a persona should make a difference.

Right now I've got other, more urgent things to do.  But at some point I may come back to use hg bisect and some head scratching to find out what we did to "fix" this bug.  Or someone else can do this, if they feel the urge :-)

Comment 24

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Resolving old bugs which are likely not relevant any more, since NPAPI plugins are deprecated.