Firefox 87 issues

Software & Operating Systems Windows
1

something is not right in firefox 87. been using it as my main browser since… uh… maybe since i found that firefox supported transparency in png files and IE didn’t.

87 was unloading my pinned tabs… which the entire point of my pinned tabs is to have stuff always loaded so i can switch to them quickly and not have to wait for the page to load/appear. good for things like webmail, project tracking/communication sites, and sites i use frequently to look something up like graphemica or wikipedia.

I possibly could have lived with the unloaded pinned tabs until a next version comes out but it is also having issues with constant youtube video playback. I don’t like my background music being interrupted. I don’t know if having the browser in focus would change anything but don’t care, i do more than one thing on my computer all day every day and can’t ever change that.

I really don’t want to switch to a chrome browser variant as my main. I have 6 different chromium based browsers installed installed already and use them for various things, i still prefer firefox somewhat.

I tried using waterfox alongside firefox for a day with waterfox being used as the background youtube player. That didn’t change anything, firefox 87 was still acting like it was hitting a CPU or RAM limit of some kind and unloading my pinned tabs and generally acting like it’s running on a pentium II or something anytime i would alt-tab or click back to it after spending some time in a VM or game… so i rolled back to firefox 86.0.1.

From the searching i did for ff87 issues yesterday i seem to be the only one having problems with it. sad.

Anyone here have issues with 87 by any chance?

I checked all the settings, nothing had been changed by the upgrade. I checked a few things in about:config that i thought could have been causing problems and could not find anything that looked like it was set wrong to me. I looked at the bugzilla site and couldn’t find anything that looked related to what i’m seeing here… but honestly most of the stuff in the list there was a bit greek to me because i don’t normally spend any time looking at bugzilla issues. I have plenty of free ram (12GB of 32 in use after a restart and get all my programs started again) and an amd 2700x that was at maybe 10-15% usage while firefox was acting like it was starved of cpu cycles. Not looking for troubleshooting tips, just want to vent i guess. Extremely disappointed and a little upset.

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Maybe try their ESR versions for now? I believe it is the same one that Tor Browser runs on. It should be up to date on security features - and maybe privacy features as well? The problem is the features that you may be enjoying for now may not be in version 68 which the ESR currently runs on…

Alternatively there are also FF builds for nightly and developer builds…

Also you should probably be reporting on that feature/bug issue on their appropriate dev channels maybe on Github or elsewhere?.

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I use Nightly on MS Windows and GNU/Linux. I notice that FF seems to have more issues on MS Windows than other platforms. Going to Nightly has fixed some of the performance issues that I was having on MS Windows.

Unfortunately, I run mostly vanilla FF on MS Windows and I tend to not use the new features, since the MS Windows machine is a work machine and it is underpowered to to much more than check email and look up stuff on the internet to fix an issue.

4

I’m running FF87 on Ubuntu. I don’t have any issues with pinned background tabs not working, and use the feature daily for weather updates, audio/video playback, and forum notifications.

I loaded your YouTube background music URL in a tab, set it playing, and then pinned it.

Pressing F12 (while that tab is active and playing) brings up the Web Developer Tools. If you then click on the Console tab you will see all of the activity related to that tab. Including warnings and errors.

The chances are that that page is generating a pile of errors (for whatever reason) and the handling of those errors is what is causing the performance problem.

I run with AdBlock installed, and that prevents the page itself from sending a bunch of telemetry and tracking bullshit back to Google. AdBlock being ON generates errors. Maybe you also have extensions enabled that are causing errors? If so, turning them OFF for that page may alleviate the problem.

Hiding the Chat section of that page seems to slightly reduce the number of warnings/errors. Slightly.

The “problem” you are experiencing may be isolated to your particular combination of browser (version) and extension list (and their configuration).

If Google have decided that “you either let us track you and gather telemetry and invade your privacy when streaming on YouTube, regardless of the browser you are using, or we interrupt your experience”, then there’s not much anyone else can do about it. What I’m saying is that playback interruption might be happening from the other end of the connection, not your end. It also may be happening for reasons that aren’t superficially obvious.

FF87 gave us more privacy by cracking down on abusive cookie usage with the introduction of “SmartBlock”. If any new FF feature is involved in your degraded experience, it’s probably that one. SmartBlock only is active in Strict mode or when Private Browsing. If you would prefer to continue to be abused by Google, then you could edit your Privacy and Security settings and switch your Privacy setting down to Standard instead of Strict, or you could add www.youtube.com as an exception to Enhanced Tracking Protection.

Long story short: FF87 makes it harder for sites to act in an abusive manner. YouTube is a site that acts in an abusive manner. The conflict between the two may be what you are seeing. If so, you should make a conscious decision as to whether you want to continue to be abused, and resolve the situation accordingly. Simply blaming FF87 may not be ‘fair’. Continuing to spend time and energy to get to the bottom of what is really going on — and who/what is really to blame — will make you a better human.

PS: When I was streaming your background music, I was experiencing notable issues while editing this. Basically, typing was less responsive and smooth. It was particularly noticeable when I wanted to delete many characters at a time, or navigate through the text by pressing and holding either the left or right arrow key. When I closed the tab, the editing issue cleared right up. So, not nearly as severe as the symptoms you reported, but it was something. You may not be alone.

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I didnt notice any problems for my firefox install as well. But mybe i dint have the same use case as OP’s.

I am using only using the recommended addons from privacytools.io website plus noscript.

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i tried not playing any yt videos in FF87 and the issues persisted. I don’t know that i’ll spend any time trying to narrow down the specific issue when i can revert to an older version for awhile and kinda hope it clears up in a future version. I usually have 13 pinned tabs (none of them playing videos) and i had 50 some regular tabs open when i rolled back. Not all of the regular tabs are active/loaded tho, they’re mostly just pages that i need or want to go back to every now and then. Is there a way to see a count of tabs that are unloaded? If i had to guess i’d say i had looked at maybe 4 of the regular tabs while i was on 87 which should mean that those were the only 4 regular tabs that were loaded.

That’s not new to me, have noticed that when watching yt livestreams in firefox in a xubuntu 18.04 vm for quite some time. virtualbox, 4 cores, 5177 MB ram if curious.

I might look into ESR and nightly at some point… doesn’t seem very balanced of me to have 6 chrome based browsers and only 2 firefox variants installed…

edit:
also i just found that yt stream within the past 2 or 3 months, eventually i’ll have figured out everything i want to get from bandcamp (and won’t need to use yt for it) since most of that music seems to be there. I’ve been thinking for a couple years now that i feel like i’m living in a john carpenter movie and most of that music feels fitting.

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I just want to mention that several of those addons on that list are obsolete including https everywhere; you can achieve the same results natively (e.g. enabling https-only mode in Firefox settings and enabling cookie deletion upon exit with a whitelist of sites you trust.)

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