873897 - Screen goes black and stays that way until quitting

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Toolbar, defect)

Description

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

I know Firefox for Android has had a lot of trouble with black screens, but lately (current and previous Beta) it's gotten significantly worse.

I don't really have steps to reproduce, other than the fact that it happens when Firefox is left running in the background and then is later opened again.

The black screen affects all tabs, but not the location bar or any of the menus.

I'm running Firefox Beta on a Motorola Atrix 4G with Android 2.3.6.

(Incidentally, this black screen tends to be the only reason I use the Quit menu option, and I've heard that the Quit menu option is going away. That would make this black screen even more of a nuisance and hindrance to using Firefox for Android.)

Comment 1

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Gordon P. Hemsley [:gphemsley] from comment #0)
> I don't really have steps to reproduce, other than the fact that it happens
> when Firefox is left running in the background and then is later opened
> again.
> 
> The black screen affects all tabs, but not the location bar or any of the
> menus.

The next time it happens, can you grab a logcat using the aLogcat app from the Play Store and attach that here (see [1] for instructions)? That might provide some useful info on why this is happening.

> (Incidentally, this black screen tends to be the only reason I use the Quit
> menu option, and I've heard that the Quit menu option is going away. That
> would make this black screen even more of a nuisance and hindrance to using
> Firefox for Android.)

It's only going away for Android 4.0 and higher, where you can swipe away the app in the app switcher to kill it.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Android#Using_aLogCat

Comment 2

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

(In reply to Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail]) from comment #1)
> (In reply to Gordon P. Hemsley [:gphemsley] from comment #0)
> > I don't really have steps to reproduce, other than the fact that it happens
> > when Firefox is left running in the background and then is later opened
> > again.
> > 
> > The black screen affects all tabs, but not the location bar or any of the
> > menus.
> 
> The next time it happens, can you grab a logcat using the aLogcat app from
> the Play Store and attach that here (see [1] for instructions)? That might
> provide some useful info on why this is happening.
> 
> [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Android#Using_aLogCat

The only thing that seems to occur (filtering on "Gecko") is "Gecko event sync taking too long", at least when there's a just black screen.

It seems there may be an exception thrown, though, when loading URLs from external apps. It looks to be in org.mozilla.gecko.GeckoAppShell.sendEventToGeckoSync(GeckoAppShell.java:376). I'll try to get you the full backtrace if that's not enough to go on.

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Yes, please attach a full log.

Comment 4

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

Attachment: Stack trace from aLogcat

Filtered on Gecko.

Comment 5

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Thanks! In order to further diagnose this we will need the patches in bug 863777 to land so that we can dump the Gecko stack when this happens. Without that information we don't know why the Gecko thread is taking so long to respond.

Comment 6

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

IIRC we fixed a bunch of issues like this one a while ago. This is probably fixed as well, and I haven't seen any recent reports for things like this. Feel free to reopen this bug if it's still happening.