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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland.

It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad…

It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.

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Sounds like a configuration problem. Firefox on Fedora/Wayland is very fast, haven't had it crash in a long time.

Same. About the only thing that's stable on F37. Updates to the kernel and other things have been giving me headaches, but FF and Steam are still solid.

I haven't seen a FF crash in the last five years and I typically have a few hundred tabs open across multiple instances.

Can confirm, I currently have around 240 tabs open (yeah I know...), and most of those a running for at least multiple weeks now.

I am on X though, perhaps a Wayland related bug or config thing?

I also have crashes on sway, but there’s a rough workaround now which prevents the issue totally.

I believe there’s a design issue with Firefox and GTK handling input events; some Wayland compositors have workarounds but others do not.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7645

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144

Firefox is my preferred browser and I hope we can keep its engine alive in this era of Chrome dominance.

I have been using Sway and Firefox for the last three years at least, and have never experienced crashes. Sway and Firefox as packaged by Debian Stable. I really wish people on HN threads complaining about Firefox bugs clearly stated 1) their environment, and 2) who packaged the Firefox, because those are what could make all the difference.

The bug depends on a few factors that aren't really packaging-specific. A) the default socket buffer size B) the polling rate of your mouse C) whether there's anything on your system or in your firefox profile that can cause enough lag that the buffer overflows D) whether your compositor has any workarounds for that protocol limitation

Well, I suppose a packager could have disabled wayland in firefox...

Firefox on Wayland for me has 0 problems.

Have you tried:

- running with terminal to see errors

- running with a new profile

I haven't used it super extensively with Wayland, but so far I've not experienced any crashes. To clarify, I've been using Firefox on Debian virtualized with QEMU on aarch64, and the compositor is Weston, so maybe there are quirks on other setups. Overall, it runs impressively.

I had the same after forcing Firefox to do hardware acceleration on my Nvidia GPU. Firefox wanted to disable it, but I wanted to use my GPU anyway. Perhaps try resetting the GPU acceleration configuration?

Firefox isn't as stable as I would like it to be, but it's much better than any Webkit alternative I can find on Linux.

I had that problem, too. It went away when I replaced my Nvidia card with an AMD one.

I’m using an amd card :(

Ah, well, Nvidia still has a lot of problems with Wayland I hear, that might not be Firefox's (or Wayland's) error.

That's strange. I use Nvidia, on Wayland and have 0 issues with Firefox

I was running Firefox in Wayland just fine with my AMD Radeon 6650 XT but recently switched to an Nvidia 4060 Ti (16GB) and suddenly I started having crashes. I don't blame Firefox for this since other applications started giving me issues too (e.g. Dolphin and Discord). I place the blame squarely on Nvidia.

Nvidia's drivers suck but if you want to do AI stuff their cards are basically the only option until Intel and AMD complete ramping up their support for AI stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now AMD takes the crown with Intel being a close second (providing the best bang-for-the-buck) but for that to happen AMD needs to focus more on making actual implementations faster (e.g. PyTorch) and not just making minor incremental improvements to ROCm (and also make it so you don't need to use `amdgpu-install` to use it!).

I've had very similar experiences on Windows and Mac. I really wish Moz would fork WebKit or Blink and work on a browser for the modern age.

I can’t speak to the second point, but I’d look for OOM events in dmesg for the crashes.

Huh... I've exclusively used Firefox on Wayland for a long time now due to good fractional scaling support (unlike Chrome which took ages to stop using x11 by default). I agree that the webgl/webgpu support is bad but haven't seen the whole-system slowdown.

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