Slows. Stops playing videos/GIFs. Crashes on quit.

[GeneralUsername]

Hi there. I've been having issues with Firefox for the last week or two.

Details:

• OSX 10.12.3
  
  
• Firefox 52.0.1
  
  
• Firefox has been slow lately and seems to get slower with use. After playing a small handful of short videos or gifs it will simply refuse to play any more. They will start to load, then continue to look like they're loading, without going any further.
  
  
• Quitting Firefox results in a freeze and crash.

Things I've tried:

• Running Firefox in Safe Mode.
  
  
• Clearing history, cache, and cookies.
  
  
• Quitting all other open apps.
  
  
• Restarting the computer.
  
  
• New Firefox user profile.

I was given some suggestions on another forum. The things they told me to try were to go to about:config and enter the following changes:

• "media.webm.enabled" set to "false".
  
  
• "media.mediasource.webm.enabled" set to "false".
  
  
• "extensions.e10sBlockedByAddons" set to "false".
  
  
• "browser.tabs.remote.force-enable" to "true".
  
  
• "browser.tabs.remote.autostart" to "true".
  
  
• "browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2" to true

Unfortunately, they didn't help, either. (The line "browser.tabs.remote.force-enable" didn't actually show up when I searched for it, though).

The computer's Activity Monitor shows that Firefox is hogging enormous amounts of memory. It's literally using ten times the memory that the app in second place for memory is using.

Any ideas? I'd rather not go back to Safari.

[Grumpus]

If the files you wish to play are gifv files . . .
This is a previous thread on a problem with playing gifv files, there did not seem to be a resolution for Firefox 52.
problems playing gifv files

[GeneralUsername]

Thanks for the reply. The issue I'm having isn't just with GIFs, though. It's with videos, too. And it's not that they never play at all. I can play both when I first launch Firefox, but after a while it gets all bogged down and won't load them.

[therube]

> enormous

What is enormous?

about:crashes, the last few related crash report URLs?

[Daifne]

What is enormous?

Fair point. Comparatively enormous, anyway. Example:

https://i.imgur.com/LBP1xMu.png

about:crashes, the last few related crash report URLs?

Sure.

1

2

3

4

[Grumpus]

EXC_BAD_ACCESS / KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS
This item in all four crash reports shows something illegally/improperly tried to gain access to the kernel.
It could be a kernel module address is already in use, something occupying the address, etc.
If you have some form of control panel which allows to check things like interrupts, etc. I'd take a look there for conflicts.
It may also be something out of date on your system and the address for an action changed.

[GeneralUsername]

EXC_BAD_ACCESS / KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS
This item in all four crash reports shows something illegally/improperly tried to gain access to the kernel.
It could be a kernel module address is already in use, something occupying the address, etc.
If you have some form of control panel which allows to check things like interrupts, etc. I'd take a look there for conflicts.
It may also be something out of date on your system and the address for an action changed.

Thanks, man. I'm not entirely sure how to check for any of that, but I'll do some searches and poke around.

[GeneralUsername]

Just thought I'd mention that I discovered Firefox does not have these problems when I use it exclusively in Private Mode--in case anyone else has the same problem. It's not exactly a fix, but it's a work-around of sorts.

[Grumpus]

It seems to me to indicate Firefox did it's job and stopped something on the page you visit which tried to place a cookie, beacon or other tracking device which is suspect.