Firefox hangs intermittently (Linux)

[tohiko]

I have been a Firefox user for years and I recently updated to Firefox 62.0.3 (64-bit) on the latest Ubuntu 18.04.

Now, every once in a while, with no apparent pattern, a grey spinning wheel appears in the middle of all my loaded tabs or newly created ones. Firefox is responsive (in that I can close it, open menus or open new tab) but all the tabs have a spinning grey wheel or are completely unresponsive. This lasts for a few seconds (and happens every couple hours) then everything goes back to normal. If I have a page that is playing some sound (like Spotify web player), the sound is also muted for these few seconds. But the problem happens even if I don't have Spotify web player open (though it might be with less frequency).

Here's what I tried so far (with exactly the same results):
- Create a new profile with no plugins
- Start firefox in safe mode
- Refresh firefox from the "about:support" page
- Disable (or enable) hardware acceleration and reduce the content process limit to 1.

Any ideas? I have stopped using Firefox because of this problem, but I really don't like Chrome.

[LIMPET235]

Moving this to Firefox Support...

[Grumpus]

The sites you visit, are they media intensive?
Are you connecting to more than one intense site at a time?
Are you waiting for sites provided viewers to function?
Sometimes, if you are blocking a script or a site with some form of media and is slow to load you will see this.
Something similar happens on some news sites where a replay of TV broadcast is involved.
If you see a panel place your cursor over the bottom of the panel and see if a pause or other controls show.
If the entire page is showing and only the activity indicator is cycling see if the tab is in full screen, try a smaller screen if so.

[tohiko]

The sites you visit, are they media intensive?
Are you connecting to more than one intense site at a time?
Are you waiting for sites provided viewers to function?
Sometimes, if you are blocking a script or a site with some form of media and is slow to load you will see this.
Something similar happens on some news sites where a replay of TV broadcast is involved.
If you see a panel place your cursor over the bottom of the panel and see if a pause or other controls show.
If the entire page is showing and only the activity indicator is cycling see if the tab is in full screen, try a smaller screen if so.

Most website are not crazy media-intensive. And my browsing experience is not different on Chrome (or older versions of Firefox) where this problem does not appear. I am not blocking any scripts, since the problem appears even with a clean profile with no plugins.

[Grumpus]

In /edit /preferences/General - Have you checked the DRM - Digital Rights Management.
If the media on the sites is protected this could cause the issue if the DRM is not checked.

[milomak]

can you give an example of a site?

i'm running debian sid and ff 60.2.2 esr and thinking of moving out of esr. so i will test and then move to non-esr