Hacker News Reader

Comment by rei_ayanami | Hacker News Reader

Well it crashes my computer like 3 times a day on Linux, I now know its because of hardware acceleration, but I don't expect average users to keep using Firefox. I'm just getting tired of all the things that is happening to Firefox. Although I've been using it for the past 10 years, I might have to look for alternatives.

View on HN

If it's crashing your computer you can pretty squarely place the blame on the driver, not the browser.

Without bugs in the driver, even bad behaviour from the browser shouldn't bring the whole machine down.

Graphics drivers are sadly famously buggy, and occasionally the hardware is buggy too, and the driver needs to work around those bugs in the hardware, and occasionally the users hardware specifically is broken in some way, and then there's no winning.

It's probably true that Firefox has less workarounds for buggy drivers hardcoded into it than Chromium, but in the end the blame is on the driver, and if they had blacklisted your driver the likely "improvement" is you'd no longer have any hardware accelleration, which is not exactly a great result - the real fix needs to be better drivers that don't crash the system for no good reason.

Firefox is my main and only GUI browser on Debian. I use to daily and it's up/on constantly. Even with nightly builds, I haven't had Firefox crash let alone crash the entire computer. I don't view very many resource intensive sites or SPAs trying be desktop apps. The worst performance I get is usually Slack in a tab. Hasn't crashed though.

Same here. Worst thing that's happened is when it refuses to load a site until I restart it after a background update, which kinda kills my flow for a second, but at least it restores the session immediately. I have noticed something on some of the more sketchy sites in which resource usage spikes, which I am guessing is some new abuse of workers or something. The uneducated conspiracy theorist in me assumes some magic crypto mining background thing that uBlock hasn't identified yet, but I haven't been bothered to investigate since it's rare and brief.

Same here. Rock solid on FreeBSD for weeks on end (I don't go longer without rebooting). I don't think it ever crashed. And FreeBSD isn't even an officially supported platform for FF.

And no problems with websites either. I don't even have Chrome or any chromium based browser installed.

I use it on ios, macos, and windows with zero issues. I can't remember the last time it crashed on me.

Firefox uses hardware acceleration for page rendering (WebRender), WebGL, and video decoding. You can try switching to Firefox’s software implementation of each of those feature to see if that avoids the crashes.

To use software WebRender, set about:config pref “gfx.webrender.software” = true. To use software WebGL, set "widget.dmabuf-webgl.enabled" = false. To use software video decoding, set "media.ffmpeg.vaapi-drm-display.enabled" = false.

If those settings do avoid the crashes, please file a bug report in Bugzilla with a copy of your Firefox's about:support information. Perhaps there is a GPU driver bug that Firefox needs to work around.

This is exactly what I last week and this seems to have fixed the issue. But the point still stands, I don't expect my mom who uses Ubuntu to do these things.

I'm glad you found a workaround. Do you know which setting change fixed the issue?

If file a bug report in Bugzilla with a copy of your Firefox's about:support information, Firefox developers can work around the buggy GPU driver so other users don't experience the driver crash.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi

Just gonna add on to the pile of replies: I've got hardware-accelerated Firefox set up as well, and have zero issues with crashing. Can't remember the last time it crashed. Even going months back.

(And one of the PCs it's on runs a GT 710 with now outdated drivers)

I thought hardware acceleration is not even turned on by default yet on Linux? That said, I've been running hardware accelerated firefox for several years on 3 different computers with different graphics cards, what hardware are you using? Have you reported a bug?

Hardware acceleration was turned on by default for me. I'm using Thinkpad x270. Also, there is an open bug already.

It is essentially impossible for user-space applications to crash Linux. This is a property of Linux itself. A user-space application can call into the kernel through very focused API layers, which in turn calls hardware drivers. Those can crash Linux. It is almost guaranteed it is a driver problem.

I've been using Firefox almost exclusively as my browser on Windows and Linux for the last 18 years, switched to it from Netscape Navigator and Opera.

I can't remember a single time when it last crashed on me in the last 2 years on both operating systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com