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Mozilla 120 Hard-Freezing my Android 11 Phone

  • 6 replies
  • 5 have this problem
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  • Last reply by hatt.droid

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Hello,

Firefox 120 is freezing my Android 11 phone when I start typing on the search bar (weirdly it start to happens when a space is inserted). It freezes so hard that pretty much it takes 30-min to 1 hour for the phone to restart or the battery to drain.

Reverting to 119.1.1 solves the problem immediately.

My guess would be that maybe the search bar or the suggestion related code introduced something weird, as I do have a lot of bookmarks. Nevertheless, it's definitely a new issue (been using Firefox mobile since first day around 2010) and introduced in 120.0.

Since the phone is hard freezing, I can't even connect in ADB and try to see any message hinting at what's wrong. If there's a crash trace maybe some info could be dug there.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Hello, Firefox 120 is freezing my Android 11 phone when I start typing on the search bar (weirdly it start to happens when a space is inserted). It freezes so hard that pretty much it takes 30-min to 1 hour for the phone to restart or the battery to drain. Reverting to 119.1.1 solves the problem immediately. My guess would be that maybe the search bar or the suggestion related code introduced something weird, as I do have a lot of bookmarks. Nevertheless, it's definitely a new issue (been using Firefox mobile since first day around 2010) and introduced in 120.0. Since the phone is hard freezing, I can't even connect in ADB and try to see any message hinting at what's wrong. If there's a crash trace maybe some info could be dug there. Thanks in advance for the help!

Chosen solution

Got an update from the play store listed as 120.0.1 and the bug seems to be gone, despite the fix not being listed in the changelog.

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All Replies (6)

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Hi

I am sorry to hear that Firefox for Android is crashing. I hope that we can help resolve this for you. Before following the steps below, make sure that you have updated both your Android device and Firefox for Android to the latest versions available.

As a first step, close down many of the tabs that you have open to as few as possible. Does this help reduce the incidence of a crash?

If this does not resolve the issue, open the Android Settings app, select Applications then find Firefox in the list. In the section headed "Storage", selct the option to clear the cache (do not clear data!). Does this help?

Failing that, our developers will need to look into this in more detail with some logs from inside your copy of Firefox for Android. Type about:crashes in the address bar which will display information about recent crashes. If you select the most recent "Socorro" link, a crash report will open in a new tab. If you could copy and paste the address of the page that opens into a reply to this thread, we will be able to look into this further for you.

I hope that this helps.

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Thanks for the suggestions, unfortunately none of that worked:

- I have zero tabs opened, and the browser always starts in private mode which means there is no tab opened when starting Firefox. - I already tried clearing the cache and killing the firefox app, but unfortunately same behaviour.

For info, this only happens with Firefox 120, I had none of these issues with years of using Firefox mobile on Android.

As mentioned in my initial message, this only happens when I start typing (and weirdly when I hit space). I suspect an issue with how suggestions are handled or an issue with the address bar.

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After disabling the following address bar options: - "Search browsing history" - "Search bookmarks" - "Search synced tabs"

Firefox now works and I can type in the address, including typing spaces, without the phone freezing.

Firefox freezing like this is absolutely not happening in Firefox 119.1 while still having these options enabled. This seems to confirm that problematic code was introduced in what manages the address bar suggestion in version 120.0. The fact that the phone would start to slow down and then completely freeze to death after typing the first space character makes me think that the fuzzy search implementation is now broken and likely exploding in memory after anchoring the first leaf in the tree.

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Hi

I refer back to my previous answer and ask that the URL for any crash reports be made available as that will help us to look into this for you.

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Sorry, I forgot to mention that point in my last message. There is no crash report generated after those freezes. I tried again now: enabled all address bar suggestion options, typed a word and a space, phone slowed down then froze then after multiple minutes rebooted. After the reboot, I went to about:crashes and the only report present there is from 12/24/2022. All of the recent freezes generated no report.

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Chosen Solution

Got an update from the play store listed as 120.0.1 and the bug seems to be gone, despite the fix not being listed in the changelog.