924183 - Crashes with HW acceleration / installer should try detecting whether HW accel is "safe"

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[Fabian Giesen]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.69 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Install Firefox 24 on Windows using default installer.



Actual results:

Installer launches Firefox; Firefox crashes on every start. (i.e. I never see anything but the browser window flickering into existence and the "crash report" dialog box).

After checking support, I started Firefox in Safe mode and disabled HW acceleration, which fixed the issue.


Expected results:

Given that HW acceleration seems to be dodgy on at least some machines and graphics drivers, I think it would make sense for the installer to launch a Firefox process with HW acceleration as a "canary in the coal mine" so to speak, and if it crashes on startup, just default to no HW acceleration.

Comment 1

[Fabian Giesen]

Attachment: crash_info.txt

Stack trace and debug output log from debugger.

Comment 2

[Fabian Giesen]

See attached file for a call stack dump and the debug output log up to the point of the crash when HW accel is enabled, just in case.

Comment 3

[[:Aleksej]]

Firefox already blocks hardware acceleration with some graphics drivers.

Have you sent any crash reports?  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Mozilla Crash Reporter

Comment 4

[Fabian Giesen]

Yes, I've sent a crash report the first time this happened yesterday; I had this problem a few months ago on the same machine with an older version of FF and the same graphics drivers (haven't updated in over half a year). I sent a crash report that time as well but didn't pursue it further (just used Chrome instead).

Blacklisting bad drivers / driver versions is one way, and probably the only way to deal with drivers that produce corrupt visual results *without* crashing. Launching a test instance of FF after setup and just disabling HW acceleration when it crashes immediately is admittedly crude, but it would provide a better "out of the box experience" for users with bad drivers that aren't blacklisted yet. (Or simply users with broken machines)

Comment 5

[[:Aleksej]]

(In reply to Fabian Giesen from comment #4)
> Yes, I've sent a crash report the first time this happened yesterday;

Please post the crash id from about:crashes.

> Blacklisting bad drivers / driver versions is 

That's bug 623631.

Comment 6

[Fabian Giesen]

Here: https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/bp-a75135cd-9147-4013-8a2e-8db392131007

Comment 7

[u279076]

We're no longer seeing this crash in crash-data. Please reopen this bug report if you can still reproduce.