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Yeah, the alternative is running a system with a ton of outdated software, with known bugs and active exploits while casually surfing the "oh-so-cosy-and-entirely-harmless" WWW...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

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

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.

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!

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