Firefox freezes and turns grey in Gutsy

[WileyCoyote]

Originally Posted by mahiyar From whatever I have seen in the posts and my own problem I feel this certainly is a speed/time issue. i.e if there is a java element in the page esp. feed kind of thing like ticker and it does not get input in time it hangs. Can anybody confirm whether their internets are slow when FF hangs?

I am almost positive there's nothing slow overall about my Internet access when I get the greying problem. Could it relate to slowness with the specific sites I see it most often with (YouTube, Gmail)? Sure. But those sites have LONG had performance issues and nobody else's browser on nobody else's operating system grays out for 30-90 second blocks of time every time they run into a challenging bit of javascript.

I mean I resent not even being able to cancel the page draw. Or use my back button. I just have to sit there like an *** and watch tons of grey screen time. Or kill the whole browser and restart.

Lets put it this way. I have a little handheld wireless-internet Nokia N800 device running Linux on a tiny wimpy ARM processor that can web browse to Gmail.com and run those crappy javascripts better than the current Ubuntu seems to be able to do it. That says a lot.

What's most upsetting is that Ubuntu seems to have decided its not their problem. They won't assign the problem and/or are rating it low priority. Look at the following pages for proof of that.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/172419

Note the header "Bug #172419 is not in Ubuntu".

and

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ox/+bug/124581

Note the header "Bug #124581 in firefox". Also, the "importance low" rating.


This is all nonsense. Nobody else's Firefox gets this. Ergo, the problem IS in Ubuntu.

I'm a few days away, I think, from switching back to SUSE. Or perhaps playing with the new Fedora. Because as much as I hate to reduce a computer to web browsing, that IS about 3/4 of what I do on one. I may monkey around with some of the more radical solutions suggested to deal with this problem, but I find myself wondering if its worth the trouble.

[mahiyar]

I know how it feels. Luckily for me sites like gmail, youtube, etc work fine its only some site and always on those sites it freezes. For these sites I use Opera.

[cresny]

Add me to the satisfied Ubuntuzilla script beneficiaries. For the past week Firefox has worked flawlessly, with seemingly less CPU load (can't verify this). If you still get the gusty grey-out, don't waste any time, it only takes a minute to install. Btw, I have Google toolbar, adblock, and several other plugins + flash. No issues at all after a week of hard use.

One plugin I do NOT have since installing standard firefox is Ubuntufox. This was new in gutsy - could it have been this all along, or did I miss someone uninstalling it?

Anyway, the folks at Canonical must be asleep at the wheel. If there's one way to make people hate the user experience, mess up the web browser!

[ajhinz]

I'm running 7.10 64-bit edition, and I was having the same problem.

My guess was that it had something to do with Flash. I (mistakenly) used this script to install it:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=476924

It was a mistake because I got my names mixed up (I thought 7.10 was Feisty Fawn). Therefore i ran the script, telling it that I was running Feisty Fawn. After that, Flash worked great in Firefox.

Later, Ubuntu tells me that nspluginwrapper is out of date. After updating that, I started getting the grey out that people have talked about.

My solution was to remove nspluginwrapper with Synaptic (and probably any other flash-related packages installed) and run the script in the thread above. It worked for me.

Maybe someone with more knowledge can look into if the current version of nspluginwrapper is bad? Also, someone find out what version the script downloads.

[bkline]

Originally Posted by bkline Can you provide more details on the process you followed to install "Flash from the prompt that you get from the firefox browser ..."? I followed your steps but then ended up with an "installation failed" message, which then took me to Adobe's site for "manual installation" with three options for Linux: a tar file, an RPM file, and a YUM file. Which one did you pick? Or did you not get the failure message pushing you into the manual installation path?

Well, brjoon1021 was apparently unwilling to share any further details so I went ahead and installed from the tar file. Didn't solve the problem. So I've tried the replacement Flash plug-in, the Ubuntuzilla dstro for the browser, and completely disabling the flashy desktop eye candy, and the browser is still freezing up solid several times per day. I can't believe the Windows workstation I work on for one of my customers is more reliable than my main Linux workstation! I never thought I'd see the day where the uptime for the Windows machine is measured in weeks and I'm rebooting Linux several times a day.

The icing on the cake was when I tried to back out the replacement Flash plug-in and reinstall the Ubuntu package, at which point I was told it couldn't install the plug-in because the MD5 sum is bad.

Ubuntu is in a shambles at the moment.

[Merovius]

Not sure if this is the cause for others. I was having crazy amounts of graying out and freezing up when large flash sites like YouTube were loading. I tried many reinstalls of Flash from Adobe and Gnash etc. No help. Then I disabled these two plugins:" Ubufox" and "User Agent Switcher". I have just run two videos from YouTube on separate tabs with no freeze up or gray. I even switched back and forth. No problem. Just thought I'd put it out there.

[jamillikan]

Installing Opera 9.50 resolved the issue for me. No more freezing for me when I use Opera. Firefox still freezes. Wish they would fix Firefox because I really like it, but Opera, for me, is more reliable.

Wonder why that is? It's definitely a problem with Firefox somewhere and not Ubuntu.

[WileyCoyote]

Originally Posted by jamillikan Installing Opera 9.50 resolved the issue for me. No more freezing for me when I use Opera. Firefox still freezes. Wish they would fix Firefox because I really like it, but Opera, for me, is more reliable. Wonder why that is? It's definitely a problem with Firefox somewhere and not Ubuntu.

No, its Ubuntu.

At least in the sense that it appears to specifically be the interaction BETWEEN Ubuntu and Firefox. It appears to be due to Ubuntu custom code or integration, because I haven't read ANY reports of a similar problem on other distributions.

If we let it be dismissed simply as a "Firefox" problem, it will likely never get fixed. Is Firefox going to fix the Ubufox extension if its that? Or the way that Compiz interacts with Firefox? Sure, some combination of Flash, Java and Firefox is what's triggering this, and those are all non-Ubuntu maintained items, but something Ubuntu exclusive is interacting and doing this. And it looks like they aren't going to admit it, or fix it, I guess.

[ozone702]

Here's what I did to solve the problem:

I went to System / Preferences / Sound.
I went to Sounds tab.
I changed Log in: to No sound.
I changed Log out: to No sound.
I re-booted.

I'll bet what happens is Ubuntu tries to play the "Log in" sound while the sound driver is being loaded which causes fail loading. Is there a log I can check to see if this is the case?

[RgnKjnVA]

Originally Posted by RgnKjnVA bkline, I tried the rpm and got all kinds of missing dependencies (I thought that's what RPM was supposed to handle). I then installed from the tar.gz. Not only did it not fix Firefox but now I can't stream video in Opera *sigh!*

FYI: my inability to stream video in Opera was due to the Flash update. Had to install the Opera 9.5 beta to be able to stream vids again.

However, it's not even necessary because the Firefox problem appears to be resolved. I've been using Firefox for 2 days now under what are normal conditions (6 tabs open now including YouTube vid and news site front page) without a single freeze. Unfortunately, I've done so many things I'm not exactly sure what fixed it. I suspect it was installing from Ubuntuzilla and maybe more specifically getting rid of the Ubufox extension but I can't explain why the install didn't seem to fix the problem initially. Can't recall if I restarted or not so maybe it needed a bounce first. I'm just giddy to have my FF back! Hooray!