816401 - Streaming media pauses on PDF print

Status: NEW

Description

[WBT]

Steps to reproduce:
1: Ensure Adobe Acrobat is installed and that it has create a printer "Adobe PDF" of type "Adobe PDF Converter." 
2: Have some streaming media running in one tab, producing audio.  In my case I have Pandora playing.
3: Open another web page in a different tab.
4: Print to Adobe PDF.
5: Observe that while the dialog box is open asking where you want to save to, the audio stops.  It doesn't stop immediately, there are a few seconds still in the buffer, but when that runs out, the audio pauses, and is resumed promptly when a location is selected and the new file saved, or the operation cancelled.

I do not observe this when printing to a different printer, only Adobe PDF. 
Why does that block the activity in another tab?  Shouldn't those processes [used in layman's rather than technical terms] be separate enough from one another?

Comment 1

[Loic]

Are medias in Flash or HTML5 video e.g.?

Comment 2

[WBT]

Pandora switched over to HTML5 sometime in the latter half of last year.
Flash media would be more obvious for an Adobe conflict, though.

Comment 3

[WBT]

This bug still occurs. Today I also noticed the same thing happening when I was editing a Prezi (which uses Adobe Flash Player)- right clicking on a particular frame brings up a Prezi-specific context menu, and Pandora pauses as soon as the buffer empties, resuming once that context menu is no longer displayed.

Comment 4

[Ciprian Muresan [:cmuresan], Experiments QA, :steve]

Hi,

I am unable to test this issue because Adobe Acrobat is a paid service and I don't have it on my PC. However I have tried to do the same with free PDF reader software that has this functionality together with YouTube. After selecting to print to PFD the stream was not paused or stopped.

Could you please try to reproduce this on the latest release(43.0.4) and latest Nightly (https://nightly.mozilla.org) and provide the results? When doing this, please try to reproduce with a new clean Firefox profile, maybe even in safe mode, as some of this issues may be caused by third party installed add-ons or custom settings(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems).

Thanks,
Cipri

Comment 5

[WBT]

Hi Cipri,

I'm quite hesitant to try the latest nightly because I don't know if it will mess up my current installation or profile at all, as has happened before.  However, you can download http://cutepdf.com/ for free to try it out.  Pandora is a better example than YouTube, which no longer relies exclusively on flash player.

Thanks,
WBT

Comment 6

[Loic]

Just use a custom profile with Nightly, it's easy.
Steps:
1) Download Nightly http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/2016/01/2016-01-12-03-02-27-mozilla-central/firefox-46.0a1.en-US.win32.zip and unzip the archive, say on the /desktop
2) Open /firefox and create a shortcut from firefox.exe
3) Start the profile manager (Run > firefox.exe -p) and create a new profile (eg "test").
4) Edit the shortcut path to add the profile:
C:\Users\<user>\Desktop\firefox\firefox.exe -P "test" -no-remote

And you can test Nightly.

Comment 7

[Ciprian Muresan [:cmuresan], Experiments QA, :steve]

Hi, 

I managed to reproduce this on the latest Firefox release(44.0.1) and the latest Nightly(47.0a1) with and without e10s. The general thing that I have seen happen is that Firefox enters a state of unresponsiveness while choosing a location to save the PDF.

Thanks,
Cipri