Asahi browser woes

Our Neighbors Asahi Linux Ask Asahi
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I’ve recently just decided to go ahead and install Asahi again (after a while) and after some testing I’ve came to a conclusion that “Firefox was crashing all the time” still.

As you can see in one of the four videos, I tried to play a heavier web-based game using Firefox, and it crashed immediately after I pressed the button that allowed me to join a game. Using Brave, the game will load but all those magenta squares will start popping up, along with a bunch of flashing, which was painfully annoying to look at for more than about five seconds. Some websites, such as the flight tracking one I was on (flightaware.com) was perfectly smooth on Firefox when moving around the map, but on Brave, moving around the live map was extremely choppy, and overall a horrible experience. Last time I installed Asahi, (ALARM) Both browsers would actually crash when moving around the flight map. Luckily this doesn’t happen anymore, but still isn’t 100% perfect from what I’ve mentioned above. I’ve seen issues like this before happen to other people, such as the Google Sheets scrolling blurriness, along with the Google maps issue.

System specifications:

2020 MBA M1 (base model. apparently similar issues were caused by people having the 8gb machines, much like me, and developers couldn’t notice anything with their 16gb machines)

OS: Fedora Asahi Remix 38 KDE Plasma (First option in installer)

HOW TO REPRODUCE:

  1. Load some heavier games through Firefox. (or even Brave and Chromium equivalents) The game I was testing with is called Mini Royale: https://miniroyale.io/

  2. The browser might crash after a couple of seconds, or minutes. Sometimes, the entire Desktop Environment and Window Manager will crash.

From my testing, it was really only web games that had the magenta squares issue, not regular websites.

VIDEOS:

Super smooth Flight Aware map browsing experience on Firefox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I-bsbaC2zc

Not so smooth Flight Aware experience on Brave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqzuMov9quU

Mini royale working on Brave but with magenta squares and other issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJj3kkbSzw

Mini royale crashing on Firefox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rUorzqXFQ8

asahi-diagnose: 10.87 MB file on MEGA

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Okay, so let’s break this down:

I tried to play a heavier web-based game using Firefox, and it crashed immediately after I pressed the button that allowed me to join a game.

Please report this here. This crash may be a driver bug or a driver limitation (some complex shaders are not supported yet, this is expected).

Using Brave, the game will load but all those magenta squares will start popping up, along with a bunch of flashing, which was painfully annoying to look at for more than about five seconds.

Please try to reproduce this with Fedora packages (e.g. Chromium, which Brave is based on).

Some websites, such as the flight tracking one I was on (flightaware.com) was perfectly smooth on Firefox when moving around the map, but on Brave, moving around the live map was extremely choppy, and overall a horrible experience.

Again please repro on Chromium or similar, and if it’s bad there too, report it on the tracker bug. Some performance issues are expected since some workloads are pathological on this unique kind of hardware and will require more workarounds, so it’s normal to run into corner cases like this (that can usually be improved with driver workarounds). Note that performance issues are often not caused by outright bugs (though they can be).

Last time I installed Asahi

That’s not really relevant to how things are right now, I’d say. Things improve quickly!

I’ve seen issues like this before happen to other people, such as the Google Sheets scrolling blurriness, along with the Google maps issue.

The Google Sheets issue is a Firefox bug (already fixed in Firefox nightlies as well as worked around in our driver). The Google Maps memory bloat issue is also long since fixed. There is a pathological performance problem with Google Maps still, but it’s not unusable, just choppy (this is not a bug but I think Lina has an idea to improve it).

2020 MBA M1 (base model. apparently similar issues were caused by people having the 8gb machines, much like me, and developers couldn’t notice anything with their 16gb machines)

That particular memory bloat bug is also long since fixed… but trying to run heavy web-based (i.e. running in a JS VM, which increases memory usage) games on an 8GB machine with unified memory that has to be shared with the GPU is… probably not a great idea anyway. Have you tried monitoring your memory usage to see whether your crashes are just the machine running out of memory?

The browser might crash after a couple of seconds, or minutes. Sometimes, the entire Desktop Environment and Window Manager will crash.

That does sound suspiciously like an OOM situation.

All in all, looks like you ran into some bugs/limitations with complex WebGL games (not entirely unexpected, please report them on that tracker bug) and some performance issues with some very specific browser/site combinations. That… hardly sounds like “Firefox is crashing all the time”.

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Please try again with yesterday’s/today’s mesa update (23.3.0-asahipre20230904…). It is certainly required ofr the google sheets blurry-ness. Most of the memory bloat was already fixed in the previous version but I’m not certain if there were other chnages.

I was able to play miniroyale for more than a few seconds inside firefox with a bunch of open tabs on a 8GB machine with mesa-23.3.0-asahipre20230904.

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That update actually fixed it! Ran the game in the three browsers (Firefox, Brave, Chromium) and no more magenta squares. I actually found the game to be smoothest in the Chromium based browsers, but that’s probably some Firefox related issue on their end.

As for the flightaware map, still not perfectly smooth in the Chromium based browsers, but that’s not really a big issue.

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Heh, I didn’t realize that got packaged this late (I did test to make sure we had the update before my reply, but I didn’t notice it was so recent).

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