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Ask HN: Firefox connection problems after enabling DoH?
696 points by killdozer on Jan 13, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 395 comments
The latest version of Firefox (96.0 and 95.02) seems to have a problem where as soon as you enable DOH (DNS over HTTPS) the browser is unable to establish any connections. Disabling this feature once enabled doesn't resolve the issue, closing the browser leaves processes hanging in the background consuming resources. Several of my friends have reported (Windows/Linux) seeing the same issue but we haven't been able to find a solution.



What worked for me was disabling HTTP3 support with the 'network.http.http3.enabled' key in about:config and then restarting Firefox. Seems like it's stuck in the 'SocketThread', repeatedly doing this:

  2022-01-13 08:20:53.075936 UTC - [Parent 4106991: Socket Thread]: V/nsHttp Http3Stream::OnReadSegment count=333 state=4 [this=7f6e295623a0]


It's been posted already but putting it here for better visibility: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908


Closed as dupe of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749910 "Firefox has witnessed outages and we are sorry for that. We believe it's fixed and a restart of Firefox should restore normal behaviour. We will provide more information shortly."


Oh wow, thank you so much for this. I've been trying to troubleshoot this for hours but because my browser didn't work I never thought of checking HN to see if other people had this as well.

Another score for automatic updates I guess.


As others said, this happened to all kinds of versions, not just 96.


I was perfectly happy with the one that didn't support this 'feature', and automatic updates are what brought it to my system.


Yeah, the alternative is running a system with a ton of outdated software, with known bugs and active exploits while casually surfing the "oh-so-cosy-and-entirely-harmless" WWW...

The goal is not to ostracize automatic updates, but to have faster fixes.

Or to separate security updates from feature updates, but I think this ship has long sailed for modern browsers.


> Or to separate security updates from feature updates, but I think this ship has long sailed for modern browsers.

That would be my preferred solution. But yes, as you say, that ship has sailed. No reason why it couldn't sail back though.


> No reason why it couldn't sail back though.

Multiplying the number of parallel maintenance tracks and associated support costs is not “no reason”.


> No reason why it couldn't sail back though

Maintenance cost.


The goal is to fully control your environment and not to expecting some unexpected updates.

User is the one who must choose update policy. If user is choosing to not update then it's their own problem and no manufacturer has the right to deside otherwise.


Automatic updates are a good default, you can always disable them if you don't want them.


Good default is to ask users about their preferences explicitly and not to hide that kind of settings anywhere.


Most users are computer illiterate, so they would choose to not auto-update to skip the hassle, and then never manually update anyways.


Every FireFox install comes with auto-update enabled.


Nope, mine on linux doesn't auto-update itself, though I update it diligently, but manually


In the past I would have agreed with you. Sadly there are "updates" which remove functionality.


In the case of Firefox, there's also the Extended Support Release. Security updates without the UI change every 4 weeks

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switch-to-firefox-exten...


In this case, ESR was also affected.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749910


Http3 has existed in ff for a while. What triggered this was some back end service switching to http3, triggering the bug.

Even if you don't update your browser, the world updates around it


My browser isn't supposed to have any 'backend services'. Especially not backend services that I did not explicitly opt in to.


It's not a backend service on your browser, it's on whatever webpage you tried to visit.


I really don't get this comment after a whole thread full of good information on this.


No, it's in the browser. Turn off all data collection and the bug disappears.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c10


lower in the linked thread:

> Telemetry has nothing to do with this, it just happens to be one of the first services with H3 load balancer.


You... do understand that that's self-contradictory, right? It's impossible for both parts of that sentence to be true.

If telemetry really had "nothing to do with" the bug, then the fact that telemetry "just happens to be one of the first services with H3 load balancer" wouldn't trigger the bug.


I think he means you that you couldn't eliminate the bug by disabling telemetry. It just will be triggered by something else later.


Sure. But the thread is in reply to this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29918998

The question isn't whether "backend services" forms the conceptual essence of the problem - I think we all agree it doesn't.

The question is whether it "happens to be" triggered by backend services.


This bug can be triggered without visiting any webpage at all.


Why don’t you just disable automatic updates?


Good question. Because for security reasons you want to stay up-to-date on software that connects to various websites. At the same time, from a functionality point of view I wished I'd never have to update anything.


It's not a question of avoiding updates altogether, but the sad reality that it always seems to choose the most inconvenient and/or expensive time to do it. If they'd just do as Thunderbird does -- notify me that there's an update and ask me what action I'd like to take -- there'd be no problem. As it is, being unable to choose when the update happens is unacceptable.

FWIW I've tried every documented setting, "enterprise" policies, etc. to prevent automatic updates in FF, but nothing seems to stick.


Hmm, works for me (Firefox ESR) under Preferences > General and there "Allow Firefox to" ... "Check for updates but let you choose to install them"

That's s private installation, a company-wide centrally managed might work differently ... but companies normally want to control updates too.


Yes it has its pros and cons like everything. But as a default for the average user I think auto update should be enabled


It's not happening to me with Firefox 95.0.1 on Ubuntu 20.04. I'm disabling http3 anyway. Re-enabling it when Mozilla will explain what's going on.

Edit: reading further comments it occurred to me that maybe I'm not affected because I'm not sending any data to Mozilla so I don't hit their HTTP3 load balancer.


Disable telemetry while you're at it: "Firefox Data Collection and Use" in settings. It seems to have re-enabled itself on some silent update. Sneaky bastards.


I was surprised to find I had telemetry enabled. I could have sworn I disabled it, but it would have been a long time ago, so I was thinking maybe I remember it wrong.

I would like to see any source that may exist on it having been silently re-enabled. I know telemetry is anonymized and totally harmless or whatever, but re-enabling it behind my back would feel like such a breach of trust.


I keep a careful log of such stuff and I'm 100% sure that I disabled it on all machines here. This definitely got re-enabled silently at some point, I am trying to figure out when. Not having such crap is the reason I use Firefox so it is hard to express my disappointment at this.


It was re-enabled for me as well. browser.crashReports.unsubmittedCheck.autoSubmit2 and datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled


It didn't re-enable for me.


When did you disable it?


Ages ago, probably the first time Mozilla added telemetry to the browser.

Go interview people Mozilla. Less analytical data but you'll end up knowing your users.


Anecdotal and same for me (it's not re-enabled). I have not touched those telemetry settings for years, cannot say exactly when.


I'm on Firefox 90 and yes it suddenly stopped working in the middle of a Youtube video.

Thanks anyone in this thread who helped!


I'm on 97.0b2 (developer edition), same issue.


Yes, I was using 95 and mine was broken too.


V94 didn't work either


I'm thankful to work in a team. As my IT dept has a habit of breaking stuff with AV and other crap-ware, I already asked if anyone else was having problems with Firefox after 5 minutes of trying to figure out what was wrong, after which someone pointed me to this thread


Unfortunately, with work-from-home that puts me in isolation. I did try it with Chrome and that worked so it at least clearly was a FF issue but I never ever counted on features with embargo dates. That totally messes up my inbound QA on new FF releases because that means that no matter how much I test a browser in my sandbox by the time the automatic update propagates to the machine I work on I can still get hosed.

Very frustrating this. Fortunately it isn't a Tuesday or I would have been ready for murder by now.


I also work from home; I just asked around in the general chat.

As I instinctively was already blaming out IT dept for breaking Firefox for some security theater reason I was glad I found the real issue quickly, otherwise I might just have accidentally dropped my laptop out the window


I did this, posted my earlier comment, then re-enabled that to see if I would be able to load pages or not and I was.

The other thing I noticed was that previously when I looked in taskmgr (windows 10) there were 4 or 5 firefox processes going on -but when I went to close firefox after setting that to false there were not.

I'll close and check again but I'm wondering if simply setting it to false once doesn't allow it to perform some update or something that lets it get back to behaving normally? Like unsticking a log jam?

[edit]Forget I said anything. When I restarted and tried to reload HN it hung again. I had to disable network.http.http3.enabled in order come back and edit this comment.


It worked. Where can I buy you a beer?


Interesting, it first hit me while I was browsing Youtube. I have been noticing aborted/stalled connections specifically on Youtube over the last week or so. I bet you they have http3 going. After upgrading to 96 today was the first time I got all new connections blocked.


Yes, I think it first hit me when I was updating gmail. I bet Google enabled something new on their services that Firefox didn't handle properly. (Without knowing any details, it could be that Google is actually doing something non-standards-compliant; but in any case FF should respond gracefully and not hang all connections, even those not going to Google.)


Wow thank you! I was bangning my head against the wall, restarting my computer, disabling extensions, etc. This worked like a charm :)


It seems there's no need anymore, autoupdate fixes the issue since approx 09:25 UTC


Which Ver number?


Yep, works. However, you need to magically restart the browser. Apperently, it runs some background processes whose names contain neither the character sequence "firefox", nor "mozilla", according to pgrep.


GeckoMain


pgrep -f and pkill -f probably do the trick.


I only had to do a hard restart (force quit it, as others point out, just closing the window causes FF to hang). After restarting, everything seems to work fine.

EDIT: my FF version is 91.5.0esr (64-bit) on MacOS.

Many of my colleagues had the same issue today, and they all report that just restarting FF fixes the problem (one restarted the computer itself).


Give it some time. That's exactly what I did first thing this morning, then it worked again for 20 minutes, then it broke again. And then I couldn't get it to work at all until I saw this message.


You're a godsend, this stupidity wasted an hour of my time, you fixed it. What a trash joke Firefox has become.


I had to force quit and restart, but that seemed to do the trick for me too. Thank you!


I had something similar - changed the setting, closed firefox, opened it again and was presented with the message "Another instance of Firefox is already running. Please close other instances of Firefox". There was a firefox.exe process running 12% (on an 8-core machine, so it was pegging one core at 100%) that I had to kill. After that FF worked fine.


Many other have already said it, but I want to add my voice too. Thanks!


I had to also turn off DoH but this did resolve my issue, wild.


I started in in `safe-mode` and assumed it was a addon that did block all traffic. Anyway Thanks


I can confirm that disabling HTTP3 support helps. Thank you for the workaround.


Thanks a lot! Do we need to enable this again later when they fixed it?


Hah, you are on HN as well, just linked to your reddit comment :D


It worked, thanks! How can we check the Firefox's logs?


If only we had transporter tech, I would send you a keg.


Thank you very much, this fixed it for me as well! :)


Thank you very much! Saved me a lot of time.


This worked for me as well. Thanks!


Thank you this indeed works.


Thanks, this has worked!


This comment should be higher.

Thank you.


Not working for me.


closing all browser windows does not work. I had to `pkill firefox` and it works


Yeah I ended up just waiting 5 minutes and it started working again.


Did you restart the browser?


also fixed it for me - thanks :)


Thank you!


Thank you!


I will have your babies, and that’s coming from a straight male.


Updates on the bug:

> We have other services with the same type of load balancer in front of it and we currently suspect it is an HTTP/3 load balancing problem.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c17

> Our current suspicion is that Google Cloud Load Balancer (or a similar CloudFlare service) that fronts one of our own servers got an update that triggers an existing HTTP3 bug. Telemetry was first implicated because it's one of the first services a normal Firefox configuration will connect first, but presumably the bug will trigger with any other connection to such a server. Our current plan is to disable HTTP3 to mitigate until we can locate the exact bug in the networking stack.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21


So for Firefox to even start, Mozilla implicitly depends on Google now. Wow.

Couldn’t they have used any other cloud provider? I mean, cmon!


No, it's not required to start. Without the bug firefox starts up just fine (in fact, if google's servers were to drop off the internet, the problem would also go away). The problem is the bug hangs all network communication when it's triggered.


And here I go explaining my friends and family I helped switch to Firefox that the browser I've installed on their computers got broken at the beginning of a new day while Edge and Chrome work fine... personally, I know very well bugs happen and I'm not mad, but this certainly hurts the confidence in it for the non-tech people.


Just yesterday I was telling a colleague who was fighting with chrome (entering the address `something.companyname.local` caused chrome to search for that string, he had to enter `https://something.companyname.local` for it to work) they should just switch to Firefox. Bugs happen but this is a pretty annoying one.


FYI There is a workaround for this: add a search engine with "http://%s" (or "https://%s") as its query URL and make it the default one. And when you actually want to search, explicitly prepend the phrase with a keyword for another search engine (like "d<space>[search string]" for DDG).


On other hand I find it annoying that the start page of Firefox has box I always think of as search, but it is also address bar. While address bar is already at top. So I search some filename just for it to try to access it...


Oh weird you're right, I don't think I've ever interacted with that extra address/search bar. I wonder what they were thinking, that seems redundant and a bit silly


It is for people like me who doesn't want every domain I ever type in to be sent to Google or somewhere else for autocompletion.

I mean, most of all lkve autocomplete, but when you type in <nameofprobationofficewebsite>.<tld> or what have you, are you sure you want everyone of these keystrokes to go to Google?

If not then you want a separate search field.


Ah I think you're mistaken. We're talking about when you open a new tab in Firefox the default landing page has a little grid showing commonly accessed sites as well as an additional search/address bar which says "Search with google or enter address"

We have the same feelings on this - I also would prefer an explicitly separate search bar and address bar.

Edit: or maybe I'm understanding Ekaros' comment incorrectly? Either way the thing I'm talking about is that there's a combined search/address bar always visible in FF, and when you open a fresh window or tab there's a landing page which has an additional combined search/address bar.


No this is exactly correct.

I can just write the address in address bar if I want. But I do not have search engine as default page or even have one in as bookmark. So I would love to just have a search box where I can copy paste a filename with either full path or as something.py... And browser to not try to access non existent .py domain which only has third-level addresses anyway...


You can, just go to settings and enable it.

(For everyone wondering why we crazy people stick with Firefox: there are actually a number of technical/ux reasons in addition to not wanting to give control of the web away to a single company.)


Aha, very possibly I'm mistaken.

I wondered why anyone still saw the search bar without explicitly enabling it.


Well I'm glad it happened, otherwise I wouldn't have learned that it was actually possible to separate these two bars in Firefox. So thanks for that :D


FF does that as well with my local dev sites. It does suggest "did you mean to go to ...", which then works.


I've spent the last 3 days angrily submitting bug ticket after bug ticket, including one for Firefox. I just got a new laptop, and the amount of things that get shipped totally broken is just crazy.

Windows 11 almost but not entirely broke HDR. It kinda-sorta works for some things, sometimes, but most apps that used to work with HDR back in Windows 10 just can't any more and are forced to use SDR with sRGB gamut only.[1]

The Win UI SDK regressed from WPF and lost all wide-gamut or HDR support at the API level (which probably explains the above). As in, Microsoft literally removed a wide swath of floating-point color support along with the wide-gamut scRGB color space. We're back to 8-bit RGB arrays in sRGB only as the only option. Like in the 1990s.

Windows Server 2022 can't activate its license unless it uses the UTC time zone. Why? Because Microsoft employees test using Azure VMs, which... use UTC by default.

Speaking of color: Firefox for a while just... stopped doing color management. Then it worked again after a few weeks when it updated.

But it might not be Firefox's fault, because Windows also seems to randomly turn color management off, or force it back to sRGB silently.

If you have a laptop with one of those hybrid Intel+NVIDIA GPU combinations, then HDR games don't work at all with the built-in display, they all report HDR support as N/A. But they will work with external displays!

Speaking of HTTP/3 in Firefox: I've had it permanently disabled because the early releases would leak about 10 GB of memory per minute and lock up the browser very quickly. But not quickly enough to prevent the automated test suites from passing.

... and so on...

The point I'm trying to get to is that in 2022 we've achieved this state of affairs where human beings don't do actual Quality Assurance any more as a job. It's all automated and those people have been summarily fired.

Any issue that is invisible to a DevOps pipeline is Not A Bug and will ship broken. If it ships in a working state, that's probably just a lucky accident, and a subsequent patch will break it for sure.

All of the issues above are caused by automated test suites one way or another. Automated tests are literally blind to output color rendering; testing that requires a physical monitor. Automated tests are almost never set up for long-term testing for things like memory leaks, because they have to run fast. Automated tests use default, vanilla settings for the host OS. Automated tests don't have funky hardware combinations. Automated tests don't measure "jank", or inconsistent performance issues, Etc, etc...

What you're experiencing is the end result of all of this. NOBODY is sitting down and validating the end-result from the perspective of a human user sitting in front of an actual device. That final quality assurance is just not there any more, and hence we're all embarrassed when we have to "show off" some piece of IT tech and find that it's just a broken mess.

/rant

[1] This bug has apparently been fixed in some beta, and might ship around the middle of this year. In other words, Microsoft is perfectly content to break display output on their consumer desktop operating system for six months and just leave it at that.


Can I add that Defender activates on top of the other Antivirus that our lovely (no not sarcasm, they are lovely, they just get tripped by MS) IT department bought and push-installed?

Earlier it said the other AV solution was turned off (it was not) and I had no valid protection.

Now it doesn't even say an excuse. It just keeps running with no obvious way to turn it off.

Surely it was good UX to remove that "clutter"?


Isn't test automation and demise of manual QA are just consequences of large increase in the test surface? Many more features, greater hardware variance, changes to underneth tech stacks, etc all lead to a combinatorial explosion of what to be tested and manual QA wont be able to cover any significant portion of it, unless James Webb like money are spent on QA.


I think it's a lack of ownership and craftsmanship. You need that grumpy old master in charge smacking the apprentices on the back of the head when they don't live up to his standards.

I'm very lucky to have grown up and gotten most of my work experience in that kind of environment. I was expected to aim for perfection, and punished without fail if I didn't achieve it. No half-measures. Do it right, or don't do it at all.

There are people shipping code right now with 100 million to 1 billion users where they didn't even attempt to get it right. Knowingly, on purpose, they aimed to just barely pass the test. To meet the letter but not the spirit of the requirement. To build something that technically works, but not in practice. Make something that they wouldn't use themselves.

This doesn't matter to them. They make the little test suite indicator turn into a green check mark, then it's time to clock out and go home.

"Job done boss."

And the boss never checked that it was truly done either. He's got no standards himself that the work needs to meet.

The build system reports green, all is well in the world.

"Ship it!"


Amen. What's worth doing is worth doing well. It's the anti-thesis of move fast and break stuff but I really far prefer the careful approach to software development over the one that doesn't care about what happens to end users.


You want to keep your job => make boss happy, reach KPI.

I don't blame them (the employee).


Well it's cheaper that way.

Want it better? Augment competition and try to avoid monopolies.

EDIT: Actionable advice: avoid SW or HW which isn't at least 6 months old.


It seems another workaround is disabling the collection of usage data:

https://twitter.com/vanilla_chief/status/1481546294489489409

€: It seems telemetry does no longer triggers the bug as they've changed something on the server side? So this probably won't help anymore.


https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21 telemetry is not the only service affected, it's advisable to disable http3 entirely as a workaround for now


This worked. Funny that this bug will cause people to turn off the opt-out data collection. No one is going to turn it back on after the issue is fixed.


Don't worry, FF will do an automatic update to re-enable it. Again. Without your consent.


They will turn it back on for you. I could swear I've had it turned off a few times already before, and I'm definitely sure I did it at least once yet here we are :).

Telemetry in itself isn't the end of the world, but disregarding the settings your users chose is such a weird behavior coming from an organization that pretends to care about choice.


I already had that disabled when it struck me.


The current theory is that some CDN/LoadBalancer updated its HTTP3 implementation and is now triggering a bug in the HTTP3 stack of Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21

It just happens that the usage data collection uses that CDN thus triggering the bug. But you can also encounter it by just visiting any other website served by that CDN.


I had too but it mysteriously re-enabled on all FF instances on various laptops and desktops here. I wonder when that happened.


Can confirm this worked.


this worked for me too


Reddit Thread with tons of comments already: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/s2u7eg/is_firefox_...

I have the same issue, a different profile worked

edit: Twitter feed https://twitter.com/search?q=firefox&src=typed_query&f=live

There better be some hell of a post mortem

edit2: `network.http.http3.enabled` in about:config to false fixed it for me. Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/s2u7eg/is_firefox_...


This didn't fix it for me until I also disabled DNS over HTTPS.


I disabled both and it continued to fail for about 5 minutes until it started working again.


I suggested that data collection should be opt-in since it is (almost) the cause of this issue, and my comment was hidden for "advocacy".

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c11


Regardless of the viewpoints here (I lean to agree with you on opt-in), it's an off-topic suggestion on a hot bug report. Keeping noise levels low on these sorts of hot bug threads is already hard, no need to make moderators job harder.


It is standard response from them now I guess.

We are only valued community members when there is a fundraising drive going on. The rest of the year we are just annoying nobodies it seems.

Try to ask for updates on the Tab bar issue if you want to trigger it again.


That's very telling, isn't it. After all, who were you advocating for?


Devil's advocate here but they were perhaps advocating against metrics at a time when Mozilla has a lot of pressure to do right and might need those metrics to perform.


of course it should be opt-in. It's ridiculous that such a thing would be opt-out.


"Advocacy"?! This is crucial information that should help them solving the problem! Switching Firefox Data Collection completely solves the problem and allows users to use HTTP3, but it looks like they prefer us not to use HTTP3 but have Firefox Data Collection turned on instead.

I mean, in normal circumstances I'd understand it, but hiding this kind of key information as "advocacy" is unacceptable.


https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c19 current info is that it's not just telemetry that can trigger this HTTP/3 bug, it just happens to be the first/most common service that users' browsers will connect to


Telemetry data snooping is the problem here. It clearly makes FF hang forever, and having it off by default would not have triggered the issue.

So data snooping is the issue here.


Firefox has been pretty unstable for me too recently, just now I had to kill several "GeckoMain" processes that kept churning even after I closed the browser. There also seems to be a memory-/performance leak that leads to the browser getting slower and slower the longer it is open, so once per day I have to close and re-open it, which fixes the issue.

I really try hard to like Firefox but it keeps falling behind. For certain tasks like debugging web applications I already resort to Chrome because the debug tools in Firefox are painfully slow in comparison. I guess FF developers have too beefy laptops and don't notice this, on my "old" T460p it makes the browser more and more unusable though. Same goes for opening "expensive" web apps like Slack or video conferencing tools, performance greatly degrades.


> just now I had to kill several "GeckoMain" processes that kept churning even after I closed the browser

Thanks, I wondered what was causing that.


This happened to me and a co-worker too, and I could resolve it with a `sudo killall firefox` and re-starting it.

In contrast to all the heat from many of the comments here, I'll say this: shit happens to any company. My trust in Mozilla is not (yet) shaken just because a bug made it into production, even if that bug made it there due to bad decisions or even (hopefully temporary) lack of vision.

I, for one, am not comfortable with giving full control of the internet to Google and friends, so using FF is one of the things that let me "fight".


Check the FireFox usage stats. They tell a pretty good story. Every couple of months there will be some major issue and then FF loses a bunch of users. And they don't come back.


I would guess it's an absolute disaster for Firefox. While it's not going to make me switch from FF to Chrome personally, this issue is big enough for me to not install Firefox on non-techies computers. I bet a significant amount of people will permanently switch away from Firefox due to this too.


> this issue is big enough for me to not install Firefox on non-techies computers

Why? Whatever you install is likely to have issues with similar impact.


Indeed. No-one ever said the revolution would be easy.


I really hope the auto-update component doesn't have the same issue, otherwise Firefox is essentially dead on millions of computers owned by non-techies.


I fear not. With http3 enabled, the auto-updater never returns a result. It keeps saying "checking...". Looks like the auto-updater itself will work only when http3 is disabled through about:config which non-technical people may not be able to do.

However I do recall Mozilla having another backdoor channel which they used sometime ago to push an emergency update. I hope that works.


Someone just reported that it looks like a load balancer issue. Presumably, if that's the case it can also be fixed without user action: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c17


I hope i am mistaken, but the auto-updater of my own FF was blocked.


There is something about being unable to check for updates if you open the console on any site...


Exactly what I was thinking. I hope they thought about this case and made the updater use a different stack...


Auto-Update doesn't work anymore. It's the first thing I tried when encounter this issue like 20 minutes ago.

Can't access any website or making any connection without disable `network.http.http3.enabled` and restart.

This impact is huge for million of firefox users!


Good. Abusing the users for testing via forced auto updates is short sighted and hopefully enough people change browser that Mozilla change their ways.


Several non techie friends already contacted me about a broken FF. There will be millions of people with this problem, indeed.


I can confirm auto-updater got broken too. When I realized my browser (nightly) was borked, first instinct was to update.. but nope, that didn't work. Then I manually downloaded a new nightly tarball, but that also didn't help. Switched to stable (95.0.2) and that worked once, then it got borked too.


Was blocked on my machine too, but spontaneously started working again after a complete reboot without the disable http3 fix, so there is hope! :D


What is going on at Mozilla? It's getting harder to stay faithful to the organization supposedly representing the open web. They are acting more like the profit-first companies that are strangling our use of the internet. Starting a browser to a blank page should not make any outbound connection until the user requests something. Apparently their HTTP3 support is choking while trying to connect to some centralized service. This is an unacceptably poor engineering design.


Genuinely, I cannot reproduce the issue. I ensured that both DoH (set to Cloudflare) and H3 are enabled but didn't hit the snag, so either Cloudflare has a buggy deployment or the hunch (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c6) that it's telemetry activating H3.

Update: using Google's (the horror) DoH, and I didn't notice problems. Might just be CF having a bad H3 deployment, but I want to know what bug it triggered on FF.

Update 2: To clarify, CF did indeed hang FF, but also Google, which is know for at least bothering to monitor complaints (and dns.google is still H2). Trying to disable telemetry now.

Update 3: incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org is still H2. Can someone give me the other domains of MozTelemetry? Browser still working as of the moment.

Update 4: Telemetry was indeed H3'd: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c17, me angery right now.


Did you have telemetry disabled?

It sounds like users with telemetry disabled were not affected.

EDIT: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c19 this is seemingly not the case, other HTTP/3 services can also trigger the same bug, telemetry just happens to be the most common / first to be triggered


I think it has been fixed, I didn't do any fixing on my own and it just worked after 20-30 minutes again


It goes up and down as long as that http3 setting is enabled, if you disable it it just works and continues to work.

I've had it working intermittently all morning but after that setting got set to false it never failed.


I had the issue earlier today, then after a restart it went away. Not 3 minutes ago it started happening again. A restart then didn't work, but disabling http3 got me up and running.


So what's strange here is that these hangs are weeks after Firefox 95.0.2 was released. That points to either DoH provider or some HTTP 3 server triggering the buggy behavior at scale. Either is fairly scary.


I lean on this. I have a 95.0.1 on ubuntu and got the problem for about 5 minutes. Killed firefox, waited a while and tried again and it worked. So it's not an update issue. A centralized service somewhere failed. Which is, indeed, scary.


It looks like it probably was a client and server interaction. Somebody (Google, Cloudflare...) switching over more of there infrastructure to http3 triggered it in more clients.


On Bugzilla now: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908


I've been using firefox since its very first day. In recent months I have had quite a lot of issues. Somehow the fullscreen mode always shows "Press ESC to escape". Last week, somehow all my cookies are gone and I have to re-login all sites again; worst, all add-ons settings are gone too. Well quite a lot of stuff. It's my mistake to install some add-ons or something crazy, but I really hope there is any easy way to "understand and fix the problems". The browser is not a technical bomb field that I need to invest my time :(


Unfortunately no browser is yet sufficiently bug-free for a frequent user not to hit bugs pretty frequently... Eg. last week Chrome kept displaying graphical glitches wherever webgl content should render...


Saying "yet" almost implies there's supposed to be progress towards it?

If anything, I think there's been regress. There was a time, long past, when I didn't really have to think about the browser itself much at all. It just did its job and problems were rare. Browsers and the web have turned enormously complex now. WebGL is a case in point: it's complex by itself, and it also brings in all the complexity of the graphics drivers & GL implementation on your system. Graphics drivers are the most complex of all drivers on your system, and GPUs are the least reliable of your components..


I'm typing this from my rarely-used Chrome install. Firefox just broke for me, and killing all the processes and / or restarting isn't helping.

Edit: I am on Firefox 91.4.1esr, so clearly it isn't just the latest versions that are affected.


Heck, I'm running 88.0.1 and still get this. Probably some unintended timebomb bug in the HTTP3 code...


  Other workaround: Go to preferences -> Firefox Data Collection and uncheck everything. Then restart Firefox[0]
This might be better then disabling http3 as Firefox would stop working in the future when http2 is depreciated.

  [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c6


If the Mozilla telemetry service can trigger a HTTP/3 DoS bug, then I would assume that any server can trigger the same HTTP/3 DoS bug. I think I'll keep http3 disabled for now, until this is figured out and fixed.

EDIT: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21 yes, it's not just telemetry


I posted exactly that on the reddit thread and got my post deleted...


I'm having the same issue. All tabs froze and the FF energy demand spiked. I upgraded manually from 95.0.2 to 96.0 but the issue persisted.

Twitter[1] is currently lighting up with broken FF reports across the globe.

Some people are reporting that if you hold down Shift while opening it works (though any FF personalisation is wiped). That didn't work for me on Mac.

[1]: https://twitter.com/search?f=live&q=firefox%20until%3A2022-0...


At least the fix for Fx was wrapped up quickly.


I love Firefox. It's depressing to see the hate they're getting in the comments.


It's depressing what Mozilla did to Firefox.

I was and still am an evangelist but stuff like this makes me wonder.

Never saw a bug like this in a browser. By pure chance did I check if Chrome worked.


I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years and the decline in the last 5 is extremely steep.


Firefox is not what it used to be... They deserve it in my opinion even if I'm still using that browser for most of my browsing.


Just goes to show how quickly you can deplete literally two decades of goodwill.


They've been depleting that for years. This sort of attitude change doesn't happen over night, it is an accumulation.


Ever since a bigoted scoundrel had to resign as CEO of Mozilla by trying to deny humans theirs rights, HN always has a generally negative view of Firefox. Just notice the outrage on the paltry 2 million salary of their CEO, while the same people will come to defend multi milion dollar salaries of white male CEOs who are far far worse than Mitchell Baker.


Perhaps if they don't want "hate" they should perform the most basic of regression tests before shipping updates.


Firefox stopped working in the middle of writing an email. Couldn’t even restart the browser without it crashing. Rebooting didn’t fix it. Reinstalling it only temporarily fixed it. I got frustrated and installed the ESR version and it STILL didn’t work.

This whole incident makes me feel better about myself. Like any developer, I’ve deployed some nasty bugs into production. But I’ve never completely broken a web browser relied on by millions. My heart goes out to the FF team members working to fix this.


Thought it was my Internet connection as a browser wouldn't just stop working like that. Currently on Edge.


He, my corporate Edge (97) is currently randomly freezing up too, so I would not recommend it depending on patch level.


Thankfully I had Brave installed. I thought it was a wifi issue but steam and tidal kept working


On my corporate Linux, both Firefox and Chromium (which is likely the same as Edge nowadays, I guess) are affected.


On default configs, what did the trick for me was disabling all telemetry, then restart Firefox. Works on Windows and Linux.


EDIT: FIX worked temporarily.. had to go the network.http.http3.enabled route, sorry folks

I literally just fixed this problem by installing that microsoft visual redistributable https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1326304

It just started happening to me after i updated firefox.. I installe that VC runtime, restarded, and now it works.. didn't have to disable anything in the browser.. this has been happening for at least a year, reading reddit and googling..


I can confirm this on Windows. Just installed the latest VC++ redistributable and now FF works even with network.http.http3.enabled set to true.


The problem came back :( had to disable network.http.http3.enabled


Well the problem affects firefox across all platforms so...


you are correct.. happened again


I feel a symptom I've been having for a couple of days could be related, but I can't be sure: There's a site I can only access via a personal VPN connection. If I try to access it while on the VPN, it works immediately. If I try to access it off the VPN, realise it's not accessible because I'm not on the VPN, connect to the VPN and try again, it takes a good 30s to a minute to get to.

Feels like Firefox waits some amount of time before making fresh attempts to a previously failed site, possibly due to some caching.


Did you try the more aggressive shortcut ctrl + shift + R / F5? (Not sure if it was this hotkey exactly)


Yeep.


Oh man and I thought it was only me. I couldn't even refresh Firefox from the UI and had to start it in safe-mode to reset everything. That fixed it but holy moly


Actually it didn't, the issue came back. Disabling http3 seems to be needed to fix


Aaaand another bunch of users lost to Chrome ...

I've only spoken with 2 other people and they were not as lucky as me to have read about the fix on this very comment page, so they were "forced" to use Chrome/ium to be able to access the web. Not sure they will switch back to Firefox.

I am surely not switching to Chromium based browsers, but it is time again for me to consider switching to Icecat or so instead after what happened today.


> Aaaand another bunch of users lost to Chrome ...

If that's true, it's good news for Firefox. If that's all it takes to lose 0.05% of users, then when Chrome has a bug and loses 0.05% of users to Firefox, there will be a large net gain.


I would be extremely surprised if 0.05% of Chrome users are aware that Firefox exist and/or that it should be an option instead of Edge.

At this point a developed a love/hate relationship with Firefox.

It’s the only browser I use, but you need to be delusional to not see that you’re in a sinking ship and everyday you find a new hole and you see more water coming in.


I have to wonder why on this day on HN, people suddenly want to spread this narrative. Perhaps success or failure depends partly on perception, whether you believe you will succeed.


I created a short step-by-step blog post, with images, about a solution that worked for us because people started contacting our support. I think I can share it here: https://www.queuemetrics.com/blog/2022/01/13/firefox-stopped...


What's driving me crazy about Firefox is that every time they release a new version, whatever version I am running on my machine stops working-- it refuses to load any new page or to refresh any existing page.

So I have to open Safari and download and install the latest release.

Which means I can never count on Firefox working. Frustrating.

osx, if that helps anyone suggest a fix.


I'm a very long time die-hard Firefox user, the only reason I even have Chrome on my system is because I built an application that requires WebMIDI, which Firefox still refuses to support.

But I'm starting to believe that the browser wars have been conclusively lost and it's time to throw in the towel. Losing a whole morning on this trick is really pissing me off, I'm in the middle of a bunch of stuff and if not for this HN thread I'd be unable to continue to work. Very, very annoying. Browsers are mission critical, you don't just fuck around with the networking settings on a timed change.


Wouldn't you just have different problems with Chrome?

> Browsers are mission critical, you don't just fuck around with the networking settings on a timed change.

Is that what they did? I thought the problem was a server-side change by a Mozilla vendor. And if they did, how else does Firefox update networking? How does Google do it with Chrome?


Yep, I can't use Firefox for an exam I have today. It's just not worth the risk. It was already not working great on Firefox to begin with.

Can you imagine if this situation happened to someone in the middle of the exam? I'd never blame the browser for a loss of connection before a good few minutes of trying everything else.


Ugh. Much good luck with your exam though!


https://twitter.com/gabrielesvelto/status/147409707425380352...


Oh good one. Thank you!


Huh? Firefox on macOS autoupdates quite fine. You do not need to download it manually.


That's not what it is about it is about the irritating 'one more thing we need to do before you can continue to do your important work is to restart firefox'.


What if I don't want to autoupdate? Why should a browser which was working just fine one day stop working the next, just because Mozilla released a new version? Why does a new version release kill an already installed existing version?

Also, an update (auto or manual) means restarting the browser, which logs me out of my sessions, profile, and password manager.


So, looking at the HTTP3 wikipedia page I see this:

"HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a transport layer network protocol which uses user space congestion control over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP)."

Ok. Is it still a thing with internet core routers that in case of congestion issues they drop datagram packets because they're not guaranteed to be delivered anyway?


Internet routers do not differentiate between TCP/UDP. They do drop IP packets when congestion occurs (regardless what's inside).


That's correct, with HTTP3 active you are extremely vulnerable to your packets being dropped and other sorts of transport issues. The browser will ideally fall back to a different protocol if it identifies that your connection/routes/etc can't handle QUIC.


My firefox hung in a weird way and I think it might be because of this. However what happended was slightly amusing.

I was in the middle of a chess game. I played a move and the opponent's clock just seemed to be ticking down. The correct response for them was obvious so I couldn't understand why they were taking so long. Eventually I became suspicious and realised all my firefox tabs were kind of "stuck" and I couldn't refresh anything etc. Eventually my opponents clock seemed to run out completely but the game didn't end. I had to forcefully restart my firefox and when I got back to my game (fully expecting to have lost on time) saw that my opponent had played a terrible blunder and immediately resigned.


Once again, thank you to jbaiter - his HTTP3 solution worked for me.

The fault occurred mid-session, whilst streaming a live broadcast, and I lost the connection.

Plenty of people using the opportunity to criticise Mozilla, but if it's a third-party srvice problem, you can't blame them.


I generally use Firefox ESR and don't have any problems. (Note: if you use Slack things are a bit broken sometimes in Firefox ESR. In fact, there's a notice that they'll stop supporting this browser on March 1. I haven't noticed any other broken sites though.)

Last time Firefox wouldn't connect to stuff (Google sites) even though every other browser would (March 21~22, 2017, but I think that was a problem that didn't affect the whole world), the workaround was very similar to the one discussed in other comments here: disable network.http.spdy.enabled and network.http.spdy.enabled.http2

(Insert snarky comment about feature creep and questionable frontend engineering here)


ESR versions were reportedly affected as well: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c2


You'd think "can load a web page" would be included in the regression suite for a web browser. This is some pretty bad quality control even by Firefox standards.


Manual install on aging Ubuntu refused to load pages and pegged CPU.

Manually reverted, and launching my older version (92!) demanded I either create a new profile or quit.

This would have been a disaster except I tried it out on a spare profile in the first place, so I recommend this to anyone making a similar experiment.

I haven't set DOH (!) that I can remember.

Running through the initial ff setup a couple of times is a sad reminder of the progressive influx of crapware into my sill favourite browser.


>Manually reverted, and launching my older version (92!) demanded I either create a new profile or quit.

use --allow-downgrade switch


Thanks for that info! Wonder why they don't just provide a "launch anyway and take the risk" option in the gui?


I've found that AppArmor started to block Firefox:

audit: type=1400 audit(1642063521.864:246): apparmor="DENIED" operation="ptrace" profile="snap.firefox.firefox" pid=9868 comm="Shutdow~minator" requested_mask="trace" denied_mask="trace" peer="snap.firefox.firefox"

I really don't like it, but turning off Apparmor worked for me. Not sure what caused AppArmor to start complaining all of a sudden.


Your policy is blocking ptrace from processes that don't seem like they should need ptrace (very few processes need ptrace). So why would Firefox need ptrace? Some cursory googling suggests that ptrace is used for plugins and by the crash reporter.

There are apparmor profiles for Firefox, e.g. this one: https://github.com/nibags/apparmor-profiles/blob/master/appa... Maybe you could add it to your system and see if that fixes things.


This seems to fix it, even though there was already a default apparmor config for Firefox (which looked _very_ familiar).

Thanks!


That smells like the Shutdown Hang Terminator triggering a crash report.


https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908


Looks like it's all fixed now. I made the http3 changes on my Windows machine, but currently on my nixOS machine and FF is working without any issues.


Honestly it is as simple as for them to realize that people are still using firefox because they WANT to. And I believe most of these people would be glad to pay a monthly/yearly fee for a stable, secure and private experience.

I would like to come back to Firefox. But lack of focus on their core product (vertical tabs issue) and trying to woo chrome(ish) users with crappy products have turned me away long back.


Just experienced very similar symptoms. After several restarts, (including manually killing background procs). I was able to get http(s) connections working again by manually disabling all extensions and restarting. So far I have re-enabled uBlock and then I came to HN and found this as top post. Now in the process off individually re-enabling extensions.


https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/s2u7eg/is_firefox_... "This post is locked. You won't be able to comment."

That's pretty poor on the mods :(


Yes, my Firefox cannot connect, while other browsers can. I don't remember having anything like this before.


Just as another anecdote, mine failed to launch a local website I was debugging. That's my first time opening FF today.

I opened JetBrains Rider (on Fedora 35) and debugged my site (Alt + F5) and it launched to a blank page with FF locked up.

So this isn't to do with ME specificially trying to connect to an external service.


The only thing that worked for me was: - Hit Ctrl + Shift + Del (TIL this exists) -- which will open the "Clear Recent History" dialog - Select under the down "Time range to clear": "Everything" - Select at least "Cache" and "Offline Website Data"


Tried that as well, didn't fix it


I _just_ fixed a problem here with Firefox which didn't load _any_ sites when I fired up my computer this morning. It just hung and restarting didn't help. What I did to solve it was to navigate to about:serviceworkers and unregister everything there. Now it's back to normal again.


Interesting. My partner had this problem (?) or something just like it just now on her Windows machine, but my assumption was that this was a firewall problem (Windows defender had different firewall settings for Firefox as opposed to Chrome and Edge). Setting a single check mark fixed this.


I've had some struggles with Firefox recently where sometimes it will refuse to create any new connections. Going to "about:profiles" and selecting "Restart normally..." has resolved this. Leaving it here as it might help someone else + not being super-intuitive.


Weird data point. Firefox on my laptop borked as per this thread all of a sudden. I spent like 30 min trying to troubleshoot it and failed, then i moved to my desktop and there it was, working Firefox. I'm posting this from it.

Have they already fixed the problem and it was remote?


Read the thread.


Which thread? I have one borked firefox install that I fixed by disabling http3 and one that i checked 30 minutes after the borked one that still works without disabling anything. Same OS same network. I'm wondering why.


Without the fix it can work intermittently. But disabling http3 fixes it for good.

This is likely also how it passed QA in the first place. Sometimes it works...


Same thing happened to me, I had to reinstall Firefox - this helped me to get back to work.


I fixed it with starting firefox with "firefox -p". Then create a new profile. Everything should work now. Now close firefox, run "firefox -p" again and reload your old profile. Now it should work. At least for me.


I'm glad it's not just me, been banging my head against this for a while now!


Disabling DoH and properly closing Firefox most certainly works (for me). However, if you had enabled DoH then you probably do not want to turn it off, in which case disabling HTTP/3 as mentioned is the only proper solution.


> However, if you had enabled DoH then you probably do not want to turn it off

Or you simply didn't know that Firefox made it the default a while ago. I had it intentionally disabled on one machine but forgot that it's enabled on others, which made troubleshooting even more "interesting"... Why do things work on one machine but not the other?


> Or you simply didn't know that Firefox made it the default a while ago.

Oh, interesting! I did not know it is a default now. I can imagine why they would enable it by default, but when Cloudflare (which I assume is the default DoH provider) has a problem at some point everyone is doomed.

Really wish they also could make it so the data collection part is opt-in instead of opt-out (which at this point in time appears to be the actual cause of this problem).


Here it was using NextDNS by default (or at least I cannot remember ever changing it), so I guess they are distributing the possible failure a bit. But still, I wasn't comfortable with Firefox dictating which DNS service to use, which is why I disabled it on my main machine.


Wow! I was pulling my hair out over this for the last few hours. Just seemed to come out of nowhere all of the sudden. I’m on Linux, but I updated Firefox about 10 days ago and had this just start happening about 3 hours ago.


For me Firefox stopped loading content mid-browsing. I thought it's some network issues and just did other stuff, a while later I realised every other app works. So I just restarted Firefox, and it worked.

No need to change any settings.


I've experienced this issue with the default DoH provider. Trying using Mullvald now (there was a related post on HN) and the only noticeable difference is some latency in opening pages, working fine otherwise.


I have the same problem, through no idea if it's DOH related.

The strange thing it seems to randomly appear/disappear.

Most strangely it happened to trigger the appearance/disappearance of the problem with other people entering the office??


Seems to work again 09:28am UTC. I'm writing this in Firefox after having had the problem for the last 1-2 hours...

Edit: confirmed this on two separate machines where Firefox was unresponsive (Win 10 and Ubuntu 20.04)


Same here, couldn't connect on nightly, had to downgrade to normal one, crash report couldn't be sent as well, likely due to the same problem (weird, I thought it's handled by macOS itself).


I had the same issue in Nightly a few moments ago, and disabling HTTP3 on about:config worked for me.


Yes, did the same after seeing comment, thanks, works fine, back on nightly.


Did not experience this on the firewalled subnet. But I did with direct subnet to Internet.

(Closer examination of default-deny firewall shows that HTTP3 are being blocked due to custom UDP connection tracking.)

I’m fine with that.


I just had to kill Firefox.exe using Task Manager/Process manager and restarted it as it had hung. Then it started working.

Tested all versions, release, dev and nightly.

They all work now.

I did not have to change any settings or do any fix.


For the first time for a long time, today, I had to force kill and restart it on MacOS. It just suddenly couldn't connect to anything, and the process wouldn't exit on normal close.


And of course I see this thread after purging and reinstalling Firefox.


I am kind of glad there are so many folks on hacker news using Firefox.

I "fixed" it by refreshing Firefox. You can refresh Firefox from [Help] menu item, and choose [Trouble shooting Mode...]


Wow. Spent 2 hours trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with my FF on arch. But did nothing and now writing that post from FF so DNS over HTTPS service was down maybe?


96.0 made me switch back to Chromium. I couldn't work in AWS for some reason with Firefox -- replacing cloudformation templates for instance did not work anymore.


i just got this. From one moment to the next it seemed my internet or DNS was down. Chrome worked fine however, no issues at all while firefox couldn't even load https://1.1.1.1

I rebooted my PC and it seems fixed. Weird how this bug suddenly pops up. I don't even use DOH. I had to kill the process on Linux to even restart Firefox, but I needed a full reboot to get connections again.


Hugs to all the Firefox developers and SREs who investigated this.

Bring on the front lines for such a crucial and complex piece of software and associated infrastructure is tough.


Fix that worked for me: clear all history (all checks are applied). Possibly a lighter version e.g. last 1 day would be enough, although I haven't tried it.


It solved by itself on my computer (after a full shutdown in Windows with shutdown /s /f /t 0 )

Edit: And it broke again after working for 15min. Fairly strange.


Same here, actually reinstalled Firefox Developer Edition on Win 10.

Edit: the issue came back after reinstall! I had to disable http3 in about:config to resolve this issue.


Yes. Wow I thought it was just me. Had to refresh Firefox to get anything to load

Menu > Help > Troubleshooting Mode (it asked me if I wanted to refresh)


Disabling all checkboxes in "Firefox Data Collection and Use" made it work It seems to be hanging on sending "telemetry"


Worked for me disabling telemetry and related things


Hah just saw this after reinstalling Firefox from zero (that worked to solve the problem actually - needed to bring the old profile still)


Wow, I've been hitting this for the last couple hours... I thought it was my network, and then was confused because Chrome works.


Got this problem on MacOS ARM. I thought initially that my old router has ended its life, until I started Safari just to check...


Disabling all the extension seems to work around this as well, for me at least. But honestly, what's life without extensions.


For life without most extensions, try Firefox mobile...


There is a relatively easy fix for that, I use all my desktop extensions without problem


Even that didn't help -and I only have three extentions. What finally helped was setting network.http.http3.enabled false in about config.


This worked for me too. However, I re-enabled them after and everything was good again.


Got the exact same issue just now. I managed to solve it by clearing all the cookies and websites data, from the Firefox settings.


So, when is someone going to create a minimal patch set that:

- lets us opt of automatic meddling from Mozillas side

- fixes a single small thing every month

I want to pay for it.


I reset my computer and it fixed it for me.


Same here. Meanwhile I've been using Tor.


Just want to say thank you for posting this, because I've been trying to work it out for the last half hour.


Had the problem but seems it is fixed now?


I’d only installed it ~24hrs ago onto a new MBP. So my fix was `brew uninstall` and then reinstall. That worked.


This is why there needs to be more than a single browser codebase. Monocultures have really bad failure modes.


Might it be that Firefox checks if there are updates for it and hangs if it can’t connect to the server?


I just went to Settings > Network Settings and clicked No Proxy. Closed browser and it works again.


Go to preferences -> Security -> Data collection and Firefox usage. Uncheck everything. Voila!


Happened to me this morning.

I thought my internet was down but nope, it was Firefox. Everything else was working fine.


This is ridiculously unacceptable, as someone affected by it out of the blue without turning on DOH.


I was wondering what that was about...

Seems like I'm disabling automatic updates for the foreseeable future.


Auto-updates had nothing to do with it, in this case it was a pre-existing bug in Firefox's HTTP3 implementation getting triggered by new changes to load balancers in front of Firefox's data collection servers.


What fixed it for me was to uncheck:

"Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla"


I'm having the same issue on Firefox 88. It will suddenly stop loading anything.


For me it only happens when Teams is also running at the same time. Anyone else?


I am installing `brave` at this point. VOTE with your `paru -Syu brave` s


it definitely a firefox issue other browsers working fine...guess its finally time to start looking for a different browser. same shit every year with firefox.


I just god pinged why is Firefox not working. Now I know :)


+1 last update in Linux mint brings this issue.


Also on Mac. I reinstalled it and now it works.


642 points and it is hidden from front page

At this point it is pretty obvious.. they don't even try anymore, what a shame this place has become


what muppet keeps thinking its ok to mess with running configs enabling untested functionality?


mannn... i know i'm going to forget about flipping this http3 flag for a quick fix


Firefox guys just released a fix


Telemetry strikes again.


delete your temps if you are on windows (win+r, tipe %temp%)


it is definitely a firefox issue other browsers work fine


mac pro, couldn't establish any connections.


mac pro couldn't establish any connections!


delete all your temps %temp% it worked for me


Mac too.


Fi... Firefox? What is that?


It is time for Mozilla to stop messing around. They are losing user trust extremely fast. A silent FireFox update that cripples the browser? No active update was done since yesterday and this morning: a broken browser.

Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser!

I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap. I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an open source browser. That’s it. The past few years have been a big disappointment in Mozilla leadership and (lack off) vision.

If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web!

This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.


I don't think Mozilla's income is a problem. They are making money. The problem is how they spend that money. My impression is that they lost the original spirit. Mozilla lacked a BDFL that would embody that spirit.

What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out.

Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.

Or maybe that whole firefox debacle made me a little gloomy today...


Agreed, income isn't a problem. It's vision. But I don't want to support Mozilla in a financial way if their vision doesn't match my own. This may sound presumptuous but we really need an open web and Mozilla is one of the last defenders (and failing). I don't want my monetary donations to go to side projects, I want a great open source browser as the focus.


Maybe, just maybe, once Mozilla fails people and organizations will finally understand what terrible mistake they made by giving total control over the web to Google. Maybe this could be the beginning of a new project, managed by an institution with clear aims and no Mozilla-Foundation-style bullshit.

Remember the early days of Firefox? It crashed often, it was slow, but we had great expectations ad supported it. It wasn't easy to use it at all. At some point it made a breakthrough and installing Firefox was the first thing to do on a fresh install of any machine. People don't remember or know these times and take the web browser for granted. But now that Google has long left their original "Don't be evil" mantra and all tech is focused around the web, having an open, neutral browser is more important than ever. I wish people - including the ones at Mozilla - appreciated this fact more.


It's super important. And that's why it is also important that they focus on the browser instead of on all of their hobby horses.


It crashed often, it was slow - but still faster and far more usable than the horror of IE6. As we're headed for a web that's built for Google (...Chrome), challenging the status quo may be far harder.


> Agreed, income isn't a problem.

As long as the most Mozilla's money comes from Google (86% of revenue! [1]) income is a problem. Why is Mozilla and Firefox portrayed as the last bastion of free web technology if they depend on wealth of their biggest and evil-est competitor?

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/13/mozilla-expects-to-generat...


> My impression is that they lost the original spirit. Mozilla lacked a BDFL that would embody that spirit.

Since we are sharing our impressions, mine is that the Mozilla Foundation's current CEO doesn't believe in Firefox. Instead, I think, they are leveraging Firefox' popularity to try and position the Mozilla Foundation as a defender of internet freedom, at which point they won't need Firefox anymore.

What happens to Firefox once they achieve that? No idea. The cynic in me believes they will keep doing whatever Chrome is doing until the project is virtually dead, but I honestly hope I'm wrong.


You're probably_right. This meshes with most of their actions and a lot of comments by Mozilla employees on HN in past threads about Mozilla/FF.


At one point they'll ditch Firefox engine and turn Firefox into Chromium skin. That'll allow to drastically reduce development expenses.

Given the fact that nobody catched Servo after they threw it, the same fate will probably happen with Quantum.


> I don't think Mozilla's income is a problem. They are making money. The problem is ...

... from whom they get the money. Its primarily Google who keeps Firefox alive to prevent lawsuits against their market dominance due to missing alternatives.

A clear indication that they are in that area a de-facto a monopoly.


> What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out.

> Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.

I doubt that one. There are a lot of big companies who employ the core developers as well as the Linux Foundation which employs Greg K-H [1]. Unlike Firefox where there isn't much corporate interest behind it, there is an absurd amount of corporate interest behind Linux so in the worst case the Kernel will become a corporate committee joint effort, but definitely it won't go down the hell that Firefox currently is.

[1]: https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/


Having lots of corporations involved in something doesn't protect the direction it goes in. Corporate interests could easily, for example, try to start adding in closed source blobs or providing support for people doing so. In fact, when Linus is gone, they probably will.

Software projects do seem to benefit from having firm voices empowered to say "no". Committees are incapable of doing that. Sooner or later they end up stuffed with friendly people who compromise their way to yes. That isn't an unacceptable outcome, but it'll be a different and probably worse project when that happens.

I suppose there are counterexamples - like Debian. But they have some very interesting social traditions and they don't let just anyone in to the club.


Yep, this is what scares me too...

Commitees will be formed, instead of linux for the people, there will be corporate committees, then of course the diversity and quota ones, and in the end, "the one that pleases the sponsors"... The end results? Instead of Linus showing the middle finger to Nvidia (again), they will issue a statement, that "without contributers nvidia, we're unable to... yada yada", and binary blobs (or worse) will become part of the kernel.


None of the core lieutenants would be doing that work if their interests wasn't aligned with Linus'.

The culture around kernel development is strong, at the risk of scaring away newcomers. But a tight knit community also means it probably wouldn't change much even without Linus.


I don't understand the anger about the VPN. I think it's a good idea. Reader mode is useful, especially if you block a lot of CSS and JavaScript by default with uMatrix.

I don't know why people use DOH anyway. It bypasses your hosts file, so you can't block things as easily.


Fully agree with reader mode, it's an integral part of the browser. VPN not so much IMO.


Many people wouldn't otherwise sign up for a VPN, and there are a lot of shady VPNs out there. Mozilla can use the feature to help reduce dependence on a company that has been trying to destroy them for years (Google), and help non-tech people get set up with a VPN.


Google is the largest financial supporters in Firefox, they buy Firefox search bar. If they wanted to destroy Firefox, they’d already do it by simply cutting that revenue stream.


They can't do it like that directly, but they have been undercutting Firefox for years. For a long time when you searched Google from Firefox it would tell you to download Chrome.


> They can't do it like that directly

Why?


Or some other search engine would become their revenue stream, like when Yahoo was the default search. Without Google bidding their revenue would likely drop, but it wouldn't disappear.


True. But revenue would be significantly smaller (other engines cannot afford pay high per click, and lack of competition drives the price per click down), and revenue is already barely enough to cover Mozilla needs (see recent staff cuts).


They are the amd to my intel, their inability to overthrow me, completes monopoly-me.


There's enough Chrome alternatives to be considered "amd to my intel": Chrome based browsers like Brave, and Safari.


> Reader mode

Pretty sure they meant Pocket when referring to a “bookmark reader”.


Pocket lacks some important features I want it to have so I decided negative when considering a paid subscription. Nevertheless I still like it and am glad it exists. It (pocket-based home page) also is my secondary major source of news about the world and curious facts (HN being the primary).


I’m sure it is useful to some people, heck I used it for a year or two before Mozilla had anything to do with it. That said I fail to see any reason Firefox should acquire it and make it first party. Might as well acquire a webmail, a feed aggregator and a video host while they were at it.


> I fail to see any reason Firefox should acquire it

Because it was profitable perhaps? Why not acquire a relevant profitable business (many already like) just for sake of profits? And pre-installing it by default seems the next obvious step to make it even more profitable.

> Might as well acquire a webmail, a feed aggregator and a video host while they were at it.

It's way harder to make these profitable without too much investment and without using severe user-annoying techniques.

Nevertheless it's already been suggested here a number of times that Mozilla should perhaps also re-invent e-mail.


It literally takes only two clicks to remove Pocket from the toolbar. People need to stop complaining about little things like that.


It nags me all the time when opening a new container. I couldn't care less if it was a feature that I had to click away once, but it is really pushing and in your face.


So people should push Mozilla to add an about:config flag to turn it off, if it doesn't already exist. The solution is much simpler than demanding that Mozilla completely stop trying to find a way to reduce dependence on Google.


One thing though, most of these new features are mitigations of annoyances (popups, crazy formatting, too much js, lack of privacy). It's odd how devs are spending time to fight against something rather than the opposite.


>It bypasses your hosts file

It doesn't bypass my hosts file... I have a couple of locally hosted websites that I have rules in /etc/hosts for, and Firefox resolves them correctly even with DOH enabled.


It might be falling back to hosts for them or if they're ending with .local or .home, it's hitting hosts file first for them.


It's not, Firefox will still check your hosts file to see if it can resolve that way. DoH is used only if using a local-only resolver doesn't work to my knowledge. Otherwise stuff like SMBIOS, Avahi/ZC or mDNS would break too.


You can locally host .com aswell


Yes, but I'm talking about this: https://serverfault.com/a/937808


When DOH was first enabled, it bypassed all the blocked domains my hosts file (Ubuntu). I don't know if it has changed.


> I don't know why people use DOH anyway.

To make it slightly less visible what websites do you visit.

To bypass DNS-based censoring some ISPs deploy as some governments require them.


That's what the VPN is for. People keep saying that they want to donate money to Mozilla. You can sign up for Firefox Private Network or Mozilla VPN for much better results than DOH, and give them a little money at the same time.

https://fpn.firefox.com/


While your point stands - it's worth pointing out that this bug was NOT caused by an update [1], but seems to have been a long-standing bug in the HTTP3 stack that was triggered due to some external site (including apparently Mozilla's telemetry provider) that changed their stack.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908


> I want Mozilla to defend the open web and create an open source browser. That’s it.

The 'open web' died when Chrome overtook Firefox and are still paying for more than >85% of all their revenues just to be on life support in return for ruining the 'open web'.

> If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web!

The web has been reclaimed by Google from Microsoft - exchanging from one behemoth to another. Firefox is always behind Chrome's features and many web developers still continue to place banners on users to 'Switch to Chrome'. So it is already over before it has started.

> it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.

One more thing, even if one was to support via 'donations', they are not funding Firefox, it is funding something totally irrelevant in Mozilla and Google is once again keeping them on life support.

What a magnificent disaster.


It seems like it has nothing to do with the version, so it's not an update from Mozilla's end. Still bad though.


If that's the case then I might be wrong. But I remember updating somewhere yesterday and using FF for a couple of hours before stopping for the day. This morning no pages loaded anymore. Hope I didn't jump to conclusions, but still.


It definitely stopped in the middle of the night - I saw it happen in real time - what's more likely is that some third party is to "blame". Although the blame still rests squarely on the shoulders of Mozilla, since Chromium browsers all worked fine. Apparently the going explanation is that something involving HTTP3 runs into an infinite loop and never resolves (explaining why it also sends a core to 100%), and Cloudflare/Google/Some Other Thing updated to using HTTP3.


> Our current suspicion is that Google Cloud Load Balancer (or a similar CloudFlare service) that fronts one of our own servers got an update that triggers an existing HTTP3 bug.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21


It just stopped working this morning after 3 hours of no problems. Both developer edition and the normal version, same problem with an older version. Chrome and Safari worked fine.

Someone really fucked up. There must be millions of non techies completely lost right now.


It's not from Mozilla. My two computers stopped at different times, and both were on 95.0.x. I didn't restart Firefox to make it happen. It just froze in the middle of the video.


looking at the internal company chat, it seems linked to an update


I mean a Firefox update was pushed by the company on our computers this night and starting from this morning, users started complaining about issues


>If they don't turn this around then I hope others will step up and reclaim the web!

Have you any idea how complex a browser needs to be? I hope this team of plucky, idealistic coders can keep up with all the latest and greatest web developments devised by the thousands of engineers at Google et al.

The web as an open, human-sized system is dead.


If you keep the browser ultra modular, I think it can work. You need to have one component for layout, one for css, one for the DOM, and you can use external libraries for media playback, javascript, networking, and so on.

I think a decent layout or CSS library would be useful outside of a web browser, too.

Then I would also only focus on the subset of websites that are "documents", not "apps". If I could decide, HTML6 would have two profiles: one ultra restricted (maybe no legacy stuff and no cross site scripting) for "documents", and one where you can do all kinds of crazy stuff like "web USB" for "apps". That's not going to happen because Google and Apple like the "open" web as complex and messy as it is, because it gives them total control as you know. But it doesn't stop a browser vendor from building a browser with two engines - your own engine for the majority of documents and chromium for webapps.


Sounds like a lot of work for moving lightly-formatted text files around. Also, essentially no-one wants it. What people want (whether they know it or not) is the latest shiny to keep themselves distracted.


I don't know a single non-technical person who doesn't complain about web browsers being slow. Part of the problem is that they don't understand the differences between computers and go for the cheapest PC or tablet, but most of it is bloat.

We tried to introduce office 365 company wide for collaboration, but we had a whole plant of 150 employees "mutiny" because they refused to use any of the office web apps because they were too slow.

This slowness is not a fundamental problem, but incidental. The layout calculations of even the most complex websites could be solved by a 10 years old computer instantly. The rendering can be done by a GPU without sweat. Look at how many polygons and shaders games had 10 years ago.

And note I'm not talking about "lightly formatted text files", but 90% of all web sites. News sites, Youtube, Reddit, .... What I'm excluding is Gmail, Office365, anything that uses Vibration, NFC, WebMidi, and other boutiqe features (you could probably add those back as libraries if you need them later). I'd argue that not supporting "apps" is a feature - you'd have to explicity allow them and they'd run in a sandboxed tab.


You could start off targeting developers, who mainly use web browsers to read documentation, HN, bug trackers, code repositories, and other plain documents.

Something for regular people would be many more years of work.


There's a reason why those components aren't modular: it has become impossible for all these components to not be tangled together, unless you're willing to bear the cost of dreadful performance.


> Google and Apple like

Apple hates web apps. These are pain in their ass on the way to forcing every app to go through their app store with all the dystopian control it implements.


It was not an update, started happening to me on arch linux, where Firefox does not automatically update. Seems like some kind of timed enabling of https3 support.


Which wasn't present in previous versions. So this is still a consequence of updates. But now, to make it extra hard to troubleshoot we put in timebombs in your automatic updates that will go off some fine Thursday morning without any warning or indication that something has just changed. Idiots.


> Which wasn't present in previous versions. So this is still a consequence of updates.

Looks like HTTP/3 has been in Firefox for around a year


Yes, but if it wasn't active then it might as well not have been.

This is a great way to bypass continuity testing, I really pity all those people working the desks in hospitals right now using FireFox who are typically less savvy than your average HN'er in trying to get their work done.

If you ship a browser with a time-bomb you are utterly irresponsible.


This isn't a time bomb, it's a symptom of the way modern browsers tend to have centralized I/O which means disk and network traffic goes through a single chokepoint. HTTP3 traffic appears to be able to cause one of Firefox's socket threads to hang, and since everything goes through it, all your network traffic is now dead. Chromium uses a similar model of routing all I/O through specific places, so it's vulnerable to similar sorts of problems (though AFAIK it has never failed this badly in production).

Basically, this could have happened at any point if a production service run by someone like Google, Facebook, Cloudflare etc managed to trigger a sufficiently bad bug in a modern browser's network stack.

If not for the centralized I/O this would just hang a single browser process, which isn't as impactful since Firefox and Chrome both split content out into many processes. It would also make it more obvious which server(s) are responsible since only certain tabs would be dying. FWIW, as far as I know this centralized I/O model was popularized by Google, not Mozilla.


It is because:

(1) I did not explicitly enable this

(2) The telemetry setting seems to have re-enabled itself on some update

(3) I don't want any services from Mozilla, I want a browser

(4) It worked until it blew up revealing that in fact, I suddenly did have service dependencies

And finally, the reason I use FireFox is exactly your last sentence, so to see that they are slipping this in under the radar is a pretty good reason to drop FF altogether, it looks as if they fail to understand the difference between shipping software and getting me hooked on some service that I am not even aware of existing. And on top of that re-enabling their telemetry when it was explicitly disabled. That really takes the cake.


This is caused by HTTP3. The only way for you to have never experienced this issue would be if Mozilla never integrated HTTP3, which isn't going to happen because the major service providers like Google and Cloudflare are adopting it. Telemetry and updates happening to use HTTP3 merely pushed the issue to the foreground, it would have happened eventually and possibly in a way that got fixed more slowly because it was happening intermittently and only to visitors of obscure websites.

Switching to a browser without telemetry and automatic updates won't protect you from this kind of network stack bug.


I do not want a centralized service that my browser connects to for any reason, and HTTP3 sounds like a lot of trouble for very little gain.

You argue that it wasn't an automatic update: I am pretty sure that the first install on this machine did not have HTTP3 support and that automatic updates pulled it in, end of story right there.

As for the telemetry issue: that's even worse because telemetry and all other forms of communication with the mothership other than automatic updates have been disabled on this machine, and has been silently re-enabled without my consent. That's a pretty gross violation of trust, and if that in turn causes me to lose a morning then that makes it even worse. Fortunately, today is not an interview day, but if this had happened two days ago the consequences would be terrible.

Finally, automatic updates would ideally just fix security issues and not introduce new, possibly unwanted functionality. I carefully select my tools for their purpose and I absolutely hate this brave new world where critical stuff suddenly stops working because some company could not be bothered to take their end users' interests a bit more serious.

Google and Cloudflare were not implicated here, it was FireFox that stopped working, Chrome still functioned just fine.


At this time it doesn't appear to be a surreptitious update, but a load balancer issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c17


Sorry, but my traffic isn't supposed to go through anybody's centralized load balancer, least of all one operated by parties with whom I do not have a relationship on the basis of the delivery of some service.

That's not how this works. HTTP/3 support is optional as far as I'm concerned and plenty of websites that I tested with do not support it and still failed due to this issue.

Absolutely unacceptable.


I'd wait a bit for the postmortem; I don't think there's reason to conclude at this time that your traffic is going through someone's centralised load balancer. Another update says that the load balancer issue triggered a bug in Firefox, so presumably fixing the load balancer issue will prevent that bug from being triggered, and then the bug can be fixed separately after: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749908#c21

But mostly: I have no real idea what's going on, so I'm awaiting the postmortem.


That part seems to be related to the telemetry issue, which, surprise has been re-enabled during one of the updates.


That concurs with what I'm seeing. Also on Arch and while I updated yesterday, FF performed perfectly until this morning.


> Please stop non-browser development and let me pay a monthly fee for a decent browser!

Unless you are a billionaire, you can't afford to. Developing a decent browser takes enormous amounts of money, good luck funding that of voluntary donations or monthly fees if in most technical aspects superior free alternatives exist. Firefox is failing badly on a few hundred millions a year; I'm sure you could do better with a CEO who isn't just a parasitical non-entity, but I doubt better enough to make that idea viable.

> This isn't just a rant, it's also a cry to let people explicitly support browser-only development via donations, subscriptions and show our support.

A pipe dream -- the web is a dead end. If you want something that can live off donation support (as opposed to selling off its users as cattle), you need a new set of protocols. The whole web stack is such a clusterfuck of layers upon layers of crap with one dominant player who can always add more of it when it suits them to slow down competitors (including bugs you need to replicate for compatibility purposes) that there is not the slightest chance of some grassroots alternative emerging.


What would be the rough numbers required to support firefox development in terms of #devs and $?

What would be the model to get started? Can we start by funding a fork (similar to iceweasel) with the eventual goal of hard forking once the needed resources are available?

I like you would be more than happy to pay $10/month. I pay $20/month for a bike! (relatively cheap in Denmark where taking my good bike to the shop costs me ~$500 every time I fall off). The problem is that there isn't a box on the internet for my CC.


> I don’t want a VPN service, bookmark readers or other crap.

Fortunately, you're just one person voicing your opinion in an unrelated corner of the Internet and you seem to be in the minority otherwise Mozilla would have made the changes you want already. Most other people either find those features useful or are indifferent about them. I, personally have no qualms with Mozilla doing what they do even if I might not use those features.

If you really want change, start contributing and bring it about yourself.


I know it's a rant for which I may get downvoted, but I've grown really tired with Firefox.

It's only my laziness (having to recreate all the setup, find equivalent extensions etc.) that keeps me from switching to another browser.

Crashing tabs, losing pinned tabs, having to restart the browser when I switch to another wi-fi (eg. return home from the office), or otherwise all I'm getting is SEC_ERROR_BAD_SIGNATURE errors (not a problem for any other browser somehow!)... or even those silly dialogs that inform me "Firefox is already running, just not responding" when I close and try to reopen it, because apparently it lingers in memory, sometimes for like half a minute, when I'm only trying to get stuff done. These little slaps in the face really add up over time.


I think that sometimes, but where else can you run ublock origin and facebook and google containers?


Multi-Account Containers are really the only remaining feature that keeps me from switching to Chrome. Obviously this won't happen in Chrome though :/


Has Chrome stopped signing you in to google browser wide without your permission?

And even if they do, can you trust google that they're not watching everything you browse through a mechanism that privacy extensions cannot affect? For example the malware database.


I don't use a google account inside the browser, so they have nothing to sign me in with.


librewolf sounds good to me


It just broke for me too! Very odd and probably the straw that broke the camels back for me. Mostly my annoyance has been odd performance issues on Linux. Brave here I come


I gave up on Firefox awhile back and switched to Brave. I felt like Firefox kept getting less efficient and more bulky after many years of using it. So far happy with Brave.


Mozilla already gave up on everyone, just look at this mess. No wonder Firefox is in decline and has given up on privacy.

You might as well use Brave. Which that is a good choice.




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