Problems with Firefox in FreeBSD

knightjp

knightjp

I don[t know if anyone has ever experienced this, but since of late, Firefox has been acting pretty strange. I works OK on the Windows system at work, but on FreeBSD, it becomes unresponsive at times and then I'm viewing a webpage or my email, the page sort of flicker into a black screen and then out.
I shutdown the app, wait for 2 minutes and then start it up again. After that it is back to normal, until I face issues again.
I'm seriously thinking of moving over to something else, but isn't Chromium based. But what else is there..? I need something that has good extension library and is able to run web version of whatsapp.
 
knightjp said:
I'm seriously thinking of moving over to something else, but isn't Chromium based. But what else is there..? I
Click to expand...
Short answer: nothing.

You want to run Whatsapp? Use a smartphone!

See:

forums.freebsd.org

The end of the web browser

I am using now a Samsung nc10, Intel n270 cpu with OpenBSD 7.2. Firefox is not anymore in the packages. All graphical Browsers seg faults, have strange behaviour, are slow or have problems retrieving Web-sites, including chrome. It is a headache. With FreeBSD 12 we have similar problems, firefox...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
knightjp said:
the page sort of flicker into a black screen and then out
Click to expand...
That could be related to your graphics driver, try disabling various acceleration features in Firefox (in case they enabled them for FreeBSD in latest versions), check if those are enabled using about://support (IIRC, stopped using Firefox quite some time ago).
 
hruodr said:
Short answer: nothing.

You want to run Whatsapp? Use a smartphone!

See:

forums.freebsd.org

The end of the web browser

I am using now a Samsung nc10, Intel n270 cpu with OpenBSD 7.2. Firefox is not anymore in the packages. All graphical Browsers seg faults, have strange behaviour, are slow or have problems retrieving Web-sites, including chrome. It is a headache. With FreeBSD 12 we have similar problems, firefox...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
Click to expand...
Not entirely true. You can run a Linux/Windows VM and run it there (that's what I do).
 
knightjp said:
I don[t know if anyone has ever experienced this, but since of late, Firefox has been acting pretty strange. I works OK on the Windows system at work, but on FreeBSD, it becomes unresponsive at times and then I'm viewing a webpage or my email, the page sort of flicker into a black screen and then out.
I shutdown the app, wait for 2 minutes and then start it up again. After that it is back to normal, until I face issues again.
I'm seriously thinking of moving over to something else, but isn't Chromium based. But what else is there..? I need something that has good extension library and is able to run web version of whatsapp.
Click to expand...

Hi,

If you haven't done it yet you could try to run it with a new profile that doesn't have any extension ?
I often noticed that having multiple extensions can get pretty messy at some point and generate confilcs for whatever reason.
Without them it magically gives some breath of fresh air to the web browser.
Then install them one by one to find which one is guilty.
That's what I do when I have a problem with a web browser, overall I tend to install the less possible extension, and now also I avoid to tweak too much the settings via about:config.
Good luck.
 
knightjp said:
I don[t know if anyone has ever experienced this, but since of late, Firefox has been acting pretty strange. I works OK on the Windows system at work, but on FreeBSD, it becomes unresponsive at times and then I'm viewing a webpage or my email, the page sort of flicker into a black screen and then out.
I shutdown the app, wait for 2 minutes and then start it up again. After that it is back to normal, until I face issues again.
I'm seriously thinking of moving over to something else, but isn't Chromium based. But what else is there..? I need something that has good extension library and is able to run web version of whatsapp.
Click to expand...
I had similar issue with i915 drivers while using firefox. After some time pages will start to flick and some areas will go black. When that happens check dmesg for more info, there must be something going on.
 
Thanks for the replies.
I prefer to answer my whatsapp messages from the browser while I'm at the computer, instead of staring at the phone screen. Hence why I liked having the Whatsapp app on my mac. Now that I'm using FreeBSD, I need to use the browser version.
I've tried Falkon. Comes recommended, but it whatsapp web won't work.
I've got a version of Brave running on my system and I just use that to watch youtube videos. That is all.
Honestly, I like FF and prefer it to others. On the mac, I had Safari for my main browsing, Firefox for other stuff and Brave for youtube. Maybe it could be the graphics drivers or something. I'm just trying to find out why it is doing this all of a sudden. I had just updated Firefox as well too. My hardware is old.
The next time it happens, I will try to run dmesg and see what is what.
 
It happened again.
I'm not sure how to read Dmesg output..
Tried to install Epiphany, but it requires installing Gnome-Desktop as a dependency.. No.. I don't want to install an entire desktop just to get a browser.
Installed "Otter" and it whatsapp does not work on it.
 

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knightjp said:
I prefer to answer my whatsapp messages from the browser while I'm at the computer, instead of staring at the phone screen. Hence why I liked having the Whatsapp app on my mac. Now that I'm using FreeBSD, I need to use the browser version.
Click to expand...
I can totally relate to this. I HATE using the phone keyboard especially because I touch type. I'm also bilingual so the auto-correct can be extremely frustrating to use when I forget to change the language. Also, changing language on the keyboard constantly sucks when I have multiple conversations going in two different languages.
 
Through this entire thread, it's amazing that nobody asked what version of Firefox OP is using... v. 109.0 is in packages, but seems to work fine, and should definitely support WhatsApp... As long as OP has enough RAM...
 
astyle said:
Through this entire thread, it's amazing that nobody asked what version of Firefox OP is using... v. 109.0 is in packages, but seems to work fine, and should definitely support WhatsApp... As long as OP has enough RAM...
Click to expand...
I am using Firefox 109.0.1,2
I had the issue before I updated it and it still is the same after. Not sure what is the issue. I don't have this issue with any of the other apps. Brave browser seems fine, although I only use it for youtube.
 
According to your dmesg output, you are running Firefox in a jail through Linuxulator (and there is this bug about an unsupported socket PR 258975), could I ask why? Or this output referres to another program?
 
fwiw, I've used Firefox for decades without issues. I'm in a lull now where I don't use it as much...for no reason at all....but, when I do, it's just fine for everything.
 
Maxnix said:
According to your dmesg output, you are running Firefox in a jail through Linuxulator (and there is this bug about an unsupported socket PR 258975), could I ask why? Or this output referres to another program?
Click to expand...
That could be referring to Brave. I got it installed using this link. https://github.com/mrclksr/linux-browser-installer
Firefox is just a straight up "pkg install Firefox" deal.
Could there be a clash in the system with that. Maybe I should say that I run a VPN extension on Firefox. I've been using one called "Browsec" for the longest time. Could that be an issue?
I've been running Firefox in this way on multiple platforms for the longest time and never had an issue and it is only on FreeBSD that I face this.
I can't run Firefox-ESR because I need to run the VPN extension and it isn't supported.
 
I used the info in Jailing GUI Applications.

(typing from memory) the key bits are:

Code: 
# on host
mount_nullfs -o ro /tmp/.X11-unix /jails/archie/tmp/.X11-unix
xhost +

# in jail
export DISPLAY=":0.0"
firefox > /dev/null

That runs firefox in the jail, but uses the host's X session. It's really slick. xfce also adds a nice little "[in archie]" in the menu bar.

Here's an example of something super powerful that I didn't realize was possible until I set this up: my jail "archie" uses Tailscale to connect to other work devices. So the firefox that I run from the jail is able to access hosts on our Tailscale network (aka "tailnet"). Firefox that I run from my host doesn't have that access, but is able to connect to my personal tailnet. Tailscale has recently added a switching mechanism on MacOS, but this is way more powerful. I can launch Firefox from different jails with different network access, and have them all visible on the same desktop.
 
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