985698 - browser.tabs.remote=true made firefox go crazy

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Clint Priest]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140314220517

Steps to reproduce:

I had been changing some about:config settings, probably not very carefully and shortly after (next day or so) things were acting very strangely with firefox.  I had tried safe mode, disabling all extensions and a few of the odd behaviors were fixed but others weren't.  

Long story short I was able to obtain a previous version of my prefs.js file and via diff isolated it down to setting browser.tabs.remote = true.


Actual results:

Most extensions I had installed were throwing all kinds of wierd errors.  Tabs would have their font underlined, strange graphic layer oddities (out-of-window boxes would appear, some areas of UI would be whited out some of the time).


Expected results:

Not sure what the preference is supposed to do but with my current profile it really screws things up.  I have a rather old profile (many years old now) with probably lots of chaffe files/directories from previous plugins so it would probably be hard to reduce this down.  I do know that with no extensions installed and having that pref set it would have similar if not all problems.

Hopefully this is a useful report, but I can understand how it would not be, if I can provide any other details please let me know.

Comment 1

[Clint Priest]

Attachment: browserConsole.txt

This was a browser console copy/paste when the problem was persisting.

Comment 2

[Clint Priest]

Attachment: browserConsole2.txt

This was an additional console capture which had some of the strange failures.

Comment 3

[Clint Priest]

Lastly, I do have my working prefs.js as well as the bad prefs.js file available though I hesitate to post them as there may be sensitive information in them.  I could upload a diff of them though if it would help.

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

That hidden pref controls is a currently-experimental feature code-named "electrolysis", which involves separating content rendering and user interface interaction into separate system processes.

It's currently expected that you'd run into lots of issues with that pref flipped. Work is ongoing to fix all the bugs (see bug 653064 and bug 516752), but it's not near being flipped on by default yet.

You should be a bit more careful messing with about:config to avoid these kinds of issues in the future :)

Comment 5

[Clint Priest]

I hear that!  I've been using Firefox for years and read the disclaimer long ago, but never been bit so badly before. :)  I probably switched that one by mistake.  Thanks for the info.