[SOLVED] Firefox 60.0 crashes when closing Youtube tabs

Maf · Guru Joined: 15 May 2005 Posts: 309

Hi guys, not all the time, but very often, Firefox 60.0 crashes when I close a tab with a youtube video:

khayyam · Posted: Sat May 26, 2018 8:58 am Post subject:

Maf ...

hmmm, I though firefox nolonger uses/supports ALSA, only pulseaudio ... not much to go on but that might point you in the right direction.

best ... khay

soundrolf

For me, this works.

Install media-sound/apulse and dev-util/patchelf

Then do as root: patchelf --set-rpath /usr/lib/apulse /opt/firefox/libxul.so

Apulse will give Firefox the Illusion to have Pulseaudio.

Zucca

Maf · Guru Joined: 15 May 2005 Posts: 309

gorg86 · Apprentice Joined: 20 May 2011 Posts: 299

This might be totally unrelated...
Firefox 60.0 crashed too on my machine when closing YT tabs, but I didn't look up what exactly caused it. After I updated to v60.0.1 the problem disappeared.

Maf · Guru Joined: 15 May 2005 Posts: 309

unK · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2007 Posts: 769

I had the same issue. Upgraded to 61.0_beta11 (from mozilla overlay) as a test and it seems like the issue is gone, so it might also work for you.
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bandreabis · Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 11:26 am Post subject:

bandreabis · Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2018 9:28 pm Post subject:

bandreabis

saturnalia0 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Oct 2016 Posts: 134

I haven't experienced this issue in particular, but as I wrote in another thread, in order for apulse to work I had to clone it from their github page, compile it, move the shared objects to /usr/lib64/apulse (overwriting the ones Protage installed there). See also the various firefox/apulse threads on this forum.

Maf · Guru Joined: 15 May 2005 Posts: 309

Issue seems to be gone for me in firefox-61.0.

tholin · Apprentice Joined: 04 Oct 2008 Posts: 203

The old firefox-52-ESR is now out of support so I was forced to upgrade to the new firefox-60-ESR. Surprisingly I got sound even with USE=-pulseaudio. I've heard the claims that ALSA is gone and it's pulseaudio or nothing but it turns out that is not entirely true. Firefox use libcubeb for cross platform audio and it still supports ALSA. It's still possible to build firefox-60 with --enable-alsa but the code is deprecated, unsupported and untested.

Perhaps ALSA still works despite being unsupported? No.... As you've noticed, it does not. Sometimes alsa_stream_destroy() gets called with stm->state == RUNNING and an assertion fails resulting in SIGABRT of the audio process. The problem looks similar to this race condition that was fixed long ago https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1037423

I don't know what cause this new problem but I know that it can be worked around by disabling electrolysis (multiprocess rendering) by setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart=false in about:config. That way it is possible to keep using firefox for at least another year with ALSA as long as you accept the downsides to disabling multiprocess rendering.

I also tested apulse but that didn't work well. Videos were basically unwatchable because to this problem https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse/issues/58

tholin · Apprentice Joined: 04 Oct 2008 Posts: 203

Another year another Firefox ESR release. This time firefox-68. I'm happy to report that ALSA still works with 68. The old crash bug that could be worked around by disabling multiprocess rendering is also fixed. I can't see any changes to the actual cubeb alsa code so I guess the fix is accidental due to some other code change.