Firefox hangs (along with other odd behaviour) due to gifs
Ever since a recent update Firefox has displayed some odd behaviour surrounding gifs. Occasionally, after viewing pages with large numbers of gifs and/or several very large gifs, Firefox will do things like not animate gifs, or even not load images at all,a and won't stop until I restart Firefox. What is more concerning is that sometimes in these situations Firefox will simply hang and stop responding, forcing me to kill the process. This page shows the hanging behaviour pretty consistently: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1021843&page=21 It seems more likely to happen when I scroll through the page quickly. The behaviour persists when I restart Firefox in Safe Mode.
Chosen solution
Firefox 39 seems to have fixed the issue.
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Is Shockwave Flash 17.0 r0 compatible with linux?
Try Safe Mode first to see if its hardware acceleration or an issue with an installed add on.
Try Firefox Safe Mode to see if the problem goes away. Firefox Safe Mode is a troubleshooting mode that temporarily turns off hardware acceleration, resets some settings, and disables add-ons (extensions and themes).
If Firefox is open, you can restart in Firefox Safe Mode from the Help menu:
- Click the menu button
, click Help 
and select Restart with Add-ons Disabled.
If Firefox is not running, you can start Firefox in Safe Mode as follows:
- On Windows: Hold the Shift key when you open the Firefox desktop or Start menu shortcut.
- On Mac: Hold the option key while starting Firefox.
- On Linux: Quit Firefox, go to your Terminal and run firefox -safe-mode
(you may need to specify the Firefox installation path e.g. /usr/lib/firefox)
When the Firefox Safe Mode window appears, select "Start in Safe Mode".
If the issue is not present in Firefox Safe Mode, your problem is probably caused by an extension, theme, or hardware acceleration. Please follow the steps in the Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems article to find the cause.
To exit Firefox Safe Mode, just close Firefox and wait a few seconds before opening Firefox for normal use again.
When you figure out what's causing your issues, please let us know. It might help others with the same problem.
guigs2 said
Is Shockwave Flash 17.0 r0 compatible with linux? Try Safe Mode first to see if its hardware acceleration or an issue with an installed add on. Try Firefox Safe Mode to see if the problem goes away. Firefox Safe Mode is a troubleshooting mode that temporarily turns off hardware acceleration, resets some settings, and disables add-ons (extensions and themes). If Firefox is open, you can restart in Firefox Safe Mode from the Help menu:If Firefox is not running, you can start Firefox in Safe Mode as follows:
- Click the menu button
When the Firefox Safe Mode window appears, select "Start in Safe Mode".
- On Windows: Hold the Shift key when you open the Firefox desktop or Start menu shortcut.
- On Mac: Hold the option key while starting Firefox.
- On Linux: Quit Firefox, go to your Terminal and run firefox -safe-mode
(you may need to specify the Firefox installation path e.g. /usr/lib/firefox)If the issue is not present in Firefox Safe Mode, your problem is probably caused by an extension, theme, or hardware acceleration. Please follow the steps in the Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems article to find the cause. To exit Firefox Safe Mode, just close Firefox and wait a few seconds before opening Firefox for normal use again. When you figure out what's causing your issues, please let us know. It might help others with the same problem.
As stated above, I already tried safe mode. The problem persisted.
Also, I have Shockwave Flash 17.0 r0 installed via pipelight, which is a wrapper that allows me to use Windows plugins via wine on Linux. That said, I am confident that that isn't causing the problem, since I made sure all my plugins were set to "ask to activate", and I did not authorize Flash to load.
Flash had another update yesterday. Also do you have the recommended driver for your version of Linux,
The one above might be too general, try to disable hardware acceleration when you load the page, then reload it to see if there is an immediate difference on that page--> Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems
Another recommendation I can give is to dry a beta or nightly version of Firefox to see if there were improvements on the release train:
guigs2 said
Flash had another update yesterday. Also do you have the recommended driver for your version of Linux, The one above might be too general, try to disable hardware acceleration when you load the page, then reload it to see if there is an immediate difference on that page--> Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems Another recommendation I can give is to dry a beta or nightly version of Firefox to see if there were improvements on the release train:
Since I have Flash set to "Ask to Activate", I can confirm that it has not been running when theses issues occur.
I am using the latest graphics drivers from the repositories for my Linux Distro.
Disabling hardware acceleration has no effect. Also, as a side note, I was under the impression that hardware acceleration didn't work on Linux yet.
I tried loading the page in Nightly. While I could not reproduce the hangs in Nightly, I was able to reproduce all of the other odd behaviour. In case it matters, Nightly told me that "Process Separation (e10s)" was on.
Are there any more troubleshooting steps I can try? None of the provided ones have helped.
Somebody filed a bug report about a similar issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1155482
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Firefox 39 seems to have fixed the issue.