Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

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gizmo
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Joined: 2019/11/05 13:40:38

Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

Post by gizmo » 2019/11/05 18:05:07

Shortly after the new firefox, 68.2, rolled out on 6 I have been receiving many reports from our users about firefox crashing.

I wasn't able to use firefox myself yesterday at all.

I am seeing many errors like:

[Parent 12418, Gecko_IOThread] WARNING: pipe error (97): Connection reset by peer: file /builddir/build/BUILD/firefox-68.2.0/ipc/chromium/src/chrome/common/ipc_channel_posix.cc, line 358
[Parent 12418, Gecko_IOThread] WARNING: pipe error: Broken pipe: file /builddir/build/BUILD/firefox-68.2.0/ipc/chromium/src/chrome/common/ipc_channel_posix.cc, line 727
###!!! [Parent][MessageChannel] Error: (msgtype=0x1E0074,name=PBrowser::Msg_StopIMEStateManagement) Channel error: cannot send/recv
###!!! [Parent][MessageChannel] Error: (msgtype=0x1E008F,name=PBrowser::Msg_Destroy) Channel error: cannot send/recv
###!!! [Parent][MessageChannel] Error: (msgtype=0x2000D,name=PAPZ::Msg_Destroy) Channel error: cannot send/recv


It will occasionally crash firefox itself but I'm not getting any core dumps nor an crash reports.

I did find 2 workarounds, neither entirely satisfactory.

1) disable multicore processing: export MOZ_FORCE_DISABLE_E10S=1

This also disables sandboxing which weakens security

2) rollback to a prior version of firefox, 60.9

This also has security implications. It also breaks a lot of addons that require newer versions of firefox.

Is anyone else seeing these problems?

I have tried a clean, new profile as well as safe mode.

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TrevorH
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Re: Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

Post by TrevorH » 2019/11/05 19:03:29

While not any sort of solution, you should be looking to replace CentOS 6 sooner rather than later anyway. It has about 1 year of life left and Red Hat only fix security problems in it that are marked as Critical. When they're asked by a sufficiently big customer they'll sometimes get around to fixing security problems with lower severities but it's becoming increasingly insecure so the quicker you're off it, the better. Especially if you're using it as a desktop for internet browsing.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

gizmo
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Re: Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

Post by gizmo » 2019/11/05 19:52:58

Indeed we are working on the transition to 7. It's just slow going at the moment.

Firefox 68.2 on centos7 doesn't seem to be having these problems.

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TrevorH
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Re: Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

Post by TrevorH » 2019/11/05 19:56:38

What might help to diagnose the problem - do you have access to RHEL? If not then the free developer subscription comes with a free-for-non-production-use RHEL license. It would be good to rule out that it does it on there too and this is not a CentOS build problem.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

gizmo
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Re: Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

Post by gizmo » 2019/11/06 14:42:23

It just so happens we have a RHEL 6.10 host I could test on.

Didn't getting any crashes, tab or otherwise.

Now to make some time to try as bare bones a centos6 install as we can do to see if happens on that.

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TrevorH
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Re: Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

Post by TrevorH » 2019/11/06 14:55:11

Personally I think I would transfer the CentOS firefox package over to the RHEL system (assuming it's not doing something vital!) and install that and see if it crashes on RHEL too.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

gjakob
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Joined: 2019/12/22 09:14:23

Re: Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

Post by gjakob » 2019/12/31 07:21:57

TrevorH wrote:
2019/11/05 19:03:29
While not any sort of solution, you should be looking to replace CentOS 6 sooner rather than later anyway. It has about 1 year of life left and Red Hat only fix security problems in it that are marked as Critical. When they're asked by a sufficiently big customer they'll sometimes get around to fixing security problems with lower severities but it's becoming increasingly insecure so the quicker you're off it, the better. Especially if you're using it as a desktop for internet browsing.
Since I am experiencing exactly the same problems on my CentOS 7.7 machine starting with the upgrade to firefox 68.x ESR, your advice to replace CentOS 6 as soon as possible does not seem to be constructive (at least) in this context. ;)
In my case, firefox usually works fine as long as the system uptime (and accordingly the runtime of firefox) is still short. After a while it starts crashing (sometimes only the tab in use, other times the entire window instance) whenever a certain website is being opened. Note that opening the same websites do not cause any problems shortly after a system (re)boot. So obviously this issue seems to be a dynamic problem that (IMHO) could be related to conflicting memory allocations.
Whenever firefox starts crashing, I meanwhile got used to just switch over to Google Chrome, which works without any problems even after days of uptime. :)

gjakob
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Re: Firefox 68.2 crashes/tab crashes

Post by gjakob » 2019/12/31 07:48:01

gizmo wrote:
2019/11/05 19:52:58
Indeed we are working on the transition to 7. It's just slow going at the moment.

Firefox 68.2 on centos7 doesn't seem to be having these problems.
Unfortunately, it does! See a description of my personal experience in my reply to Trevor within this thread...
Meanwhile at version 68.3, the problems are still the same.
Looking at the changelog of firefox 68.2 ESR - see https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/ ... fsa2019-33 - several security fixes dealt with memory allocation issues. Since firefox 68.2 and also 68.3 only start crashing after certain runtime periods (at least according to my experience), it looks to me that these runtime problems have been introduced by at least one of those fixes. :o

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