Firefox stops loading pages after some time

[Rhialto <rhialto%falu.nl@localhost>]

Since a few months (I'm not exactly sure how long) I am having an
increasingly frequent problem with Firefox: it stops loading pages at
some point.  (NetBSD 9.3/amd64, Firefox 104.0.2nb1)

First I blamed lack of file descriptors, or threads. I built a new
kernel with MAXLWP increased to 8192 from 1024. It didn't help; maybe it
even worsened the problem.

I also blamed network trouble. But it turned out it wasn't about
network traffic: cached pages also didn't load. But "special" URIs like
resource://gre/modules/ExtensionChild.jsm keep working.

The only remedy was to quit and restart Firefox.

In the beginning this happened once a day or so, so it wasn't so much
noticable. But it started to happen more and more often. Currently,
Firefox can stop working in less than a minute after starting it, which
makes it totally unusable.

I tried to compare logging output between runs, to see if some
particular message always occurs around the time that pages stop
loading. The only message that seems close to that criterium seems to be

JavaScript error: resource://gre/modules/ExtensionChild.jsm, line 836:
DataCloneError: The object could not be cloned.

However, there have been problem cases where this message didn't show,
and at least one case where it showed but I think there was no problem
(yet).

Desperately, I tried Firefox in "safe mode": firefox --safe-mode.
This "Disables extensions and themes for this session". That finally
seemed to help!

So now I'm trying various combinations of extensions. I'm always using

- Conex
- Privacy Badger
- TST More Tree Commands
- TreeStyleTab
- uBlock Origin
- NoScript

This showed other weird but unrelated issues. In normal mode, I tried to
disable all extensions, but there were some extensions that got switched
back on a few seconds after I switched them off! These were Conex,
Privacy Badger, and TST More Tree Commands.

So my first test (after no extensions at all via --safe-mode) was with
those 3. That seemed to work. Of course, showing the absence of a
problem is hard, and the only way here is to use it "long enough". I
ran it for hours that way without seeing the problem.

Since TST More Tree Commands is supposed to be a NOP without
TreeStyleTab, I enabled that one next. I really need it to handle 400
open tabs. This also has been without issue for several hours now.

--------------------------+---+---+---+
- Conex                   | v | v | v |
- Privacy Badger          | v | v | v |
- TST More Tree Commands  | v | v | v |
- TreeStyleTab            | v |   | v |
- uBlock Origin           | v |   |   |
- NoScript                | v |   |   |
--------------------------+---+---+---+
=> problem?               |yes| no| no|
--------------------------+---+---+---+

So the last 2 to try are NoScript and uBlock Origin. The latter has
fairly frequent updates it seems.

I heard from another person with similar problems; maybe they can also
try if the above information helps them.


I also have a weird page-loading issue with web.telegram.org, which
seemed separate.  That one I could fix by configuring Firefox to use a
SOCKS5 proxy. net/dante can be used for that. With my current set of
plugins however, it also seems to work. So while I thought for some time
that these were different issues, right now I'm not so sure about that.

(this mail is not signed because the gpg-agent refuses to start
properly, or something like that)

-Olaf.
-- 
___ "Buying carbon credits is a bit like a serial killer paying someone else to
\X/  have kids to make his activity cost neutral." -The BOFH    falu.nl@rhialto