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The Guardian website: 40 second hangs when using tabs (FF Android)
Hi!
Version: FF Android 101.2.0 (plus other version stuff I can provide if needed), Android 12
Just thought I'd report this because it appears to be a consistent, reasonably long-standing issue (months) on a popular news site. Or is it "just me"?
Website: https://www.theguardian.com/uk (several million uniques visitors per month)
Expected behaviour: I am able to open various links on this website as backround tabs and continue browsing.
Actual behaviour: 1. After a couple are opened, Firefox for Android hangs for very close to 40 seconds then does a deep redraw/repaint of all tabs and continues to function until I next try to open another background tab from that website. 2. During the hang tab interface continues to redraw, but the pages are not repainted and no taps events work. 3. At the end of this hang time, the pages appear to redraw from scratch and the context pop-up for the third long-press appears on top of whichever tab I was looking at.
It is 100% repro for me -- long-press fails when attempting to open the 3rd background tab, but repaint failure occurs earlier. There is something toxic happening.
Curiously, when I next view my Android Home screen, there is some sort deep refresh/repaint, as if it has been swapped-out or GC'd etc.
e.g. Is there some massive memory blow-out happening?
Context/workarounds: 1. I have tried clearing all browsing data and using a guess account on the phone. 2. I have no addins installed. 3. Neither Chrome nor FF Desktop exhibit this behaviour. This ia FF Android specific
Thanks!
All Replies (4)
Hi
Just to clarify, are you seeing the tabs refresh when you go to view them?
I'm having the same problem. My "workaround" is to switch to the home screen (-> deep redraw as described), kill firefox and open it again. The android system info shows that firefox uses a lot of memory and killing it frees it again. This also explains the home screen redraw.
about:memory ("Show memory reports : Measure") shows about 3-4GB used RAM, the vast majority in web : Explicit Allocations : explicit : window-objects : top (theguardian) Screenshot is attached.
Steps to reproduce:
- open https://theguardian.com/international/
- Scroll down and open a few (2-5) articles in new tabs along the way.
About halfway through new page parts will stop to render (i.e. scrolling down reveals a blank space), the long press menu won't appear anymore (or only after long delays) and the opened tabs won't load their contents.
I experience the very same problem. I think it is in place for more than a year. I first thought it was related to my ageing phone but i recently switched to a new one (pixel 6a) and the problem is still there and apparently restricted to the guardian website. On the pixel with Android 13 sometimes after this issue presents a system crash and reboot also occurs.
Hi
Thank you for your feedback. This appears to be linked to an existing issue that our developers are looking into. You can follow progress on this and add comments at: