[SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

jaylittle · 2018-08-08 23:36:47

So I generally update my personal Arch Linux box everyday, though I don't use testing repos. This makes it pretty easy to identify regressions when they come up, as they did today. It appears that icu was updated to a new major version and a bunch of packages which depend upon that were updated as a result. However this upgrade made both Firefox and Chromium tabs very crashy and it's so bad that it can be replicated for me rather reliably with specific websites.

I was able to get working web browsers again by downgrading the following packages to their versions in the stable repos as of this morning:

chromium-68.0.3440.84-1
chromium-widevine-1:1.4.8.1000-1
firefox-61.0.1-1
harfbuzz-1.8.5-1
harfbuzz-icu-1.8.5-1
icu-61.1-1
libxml2-2.9.8-3

That gives me a fully functional Firefox, through Chromium complains about broken Plasma integration, but still functions.

Is anybody else seeing this with a fully upgraded system using the non-testing repos?

EDIT: Almost forgot the most important part. This URL caused the tab to crash in both FF and Chromium even when every addon and plugin was disabled: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7942 … _the_Void/

Last edited by jaylittle (2018-08-09 02:00:03)

jaylittle · 2018-08-08 23:43:08

Looks like this filed bug report relates to the issue I'm seeing:

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/59578

eschwartz · 2018-08-09 00:56:30

Works for me...

jaylittle · 2018-08-09 01:02:29

Are you fully up to date and not using the testing repo?

eschwartz · 2018-08-09 01:10:35

testing archlinux-keyring 20180808-1 [installed]
testing binutils 2.31.1-2 [installed]
testing dbus 1.12.10-1 [installed]
testing dhcpcd 7.0.7-1 [installed]
testing ffmpeg 1:4.0.2-2 [installed]
testing gdb 8.1.1-1 [installed]
testing gdb-common 8.1.1-1 [installed]
testing gdbm 1.17-1 [installed]
testing intel-ucode 20180807-1 [installed]
testing libglvnd 1.1.0-1 [installed]
testing libpcap 1.9.0-1 [installed]
testing linux-headers 4.17.13.arch1-1 [installed]
testing llvm-libs 6.0.1-3 [installed]
testing lm_sensors 3.4.0+5176+dcf23676-1 [installed]
testing mkinitcpio-busybox 1.29.2-1 [installed]
testing netctl 1.18-1 [installed]
testing qemu 2.12.1-1 [installed]
testing shadow 4.6-1 [installed]
testing x264 2:155.r0a84d986-2 [installed]
community-testing ceph-libs 13.2.1-1 [installed]
community-testing pacman-contrib 1.1.0-1 [installed]

Which testing package have you determined to be extraordinarily likely to cause this issue, pray tell? The crash dump you you did not show us tells us nothing, the one from the other person's bug report which you later linked comes from harfbuzz, which is not in testing.

Trilby · 2018-08-09 01:13:51

Fully up to date with no use of [testing] here, and firefox is working fine (I tried the url in your first post, no problems).

Last edited by Trilby (2018-08-09 01:14:54)

jaylittle · 2018-08-09 01:15:24

All I'm doing is reporting a possible issue and my workaround for it. And if you look at my original post, you'll notice that it mentions harfbuzz as well as I had to downgrade those packages. For all I know it could be that you haven't restarted Chromium and/or Firefox since the upgrade or maybe there is some other factor present that ultimately causes the tabs to crash.

The reason I'm asking these questions is to try and narrow down variances that might explain the differences in behavior we are seeing. Did I do something to offend you? If so, I apologize.

eschwartz · 2018-08-09 01:22:34

Then allow me to confirm, in keeping with my title of "Bug Wrangler", I have restarted my browser before trying that url. And I tested both Firefox and Chromium.

Trilby · 2018-08-09 01:30:59

jaylittle, it was almost certainly not your intent, but I think the way your first post was presented made it hard to go in productive directions.

You came in noting a problem which is where all troubleshooting starts, but instead of detailing the symptoms - ideally with crash logs or error output - you seemed to have jumped to a conclusion about the source of the problem. Your conclusion is clearly incorrect*. But now instead of gathering relevant information, we are first being prompted to provide yet more evidence that your conclusion is incorrect (of course we are up to date and restarted our browsers) as if the burden is on us to prove that your conclusion is indeed not right.

If we scrape away all of this back and forth about your assumed cause of the problem, all we are really left with is that you are having some sort of problem with web browsers crashing. That's not much to go on.

* or at very least incomplete. The icu upgrade is certainly not sufficient to cause the problems you are having. It may be related to some other conditions of your system - but we could only discover this if we knew more about what was happening on your system.

Last edited by Trilby (2018-08-09 01:32:58)

jaylittle · 2018-08-09 01:46:53

Again I apologize. I got the crash dump out of firefox and submitted it. It can be viewed here:

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/ … ab-details

To my untrained eye, the dump looks somewhat similar to what I'm seeing in the bug report I linked to.

jaylittle · 2018-08-09 01:53:31

Okay so after seeing a few font files in the crash dump I linked to above, I decided to temporarily remove the fonts in my ~/.fonts directory as a factor.

mv ~/.fonts ~/.fonts.old
fc-cache -vf

That appears to also work around the issue. I guess I need to figure out which specific font is throwing me a for a loop as I had a few dozen ones installed.

EDIT: Just removing tahoma.ttf and tahomabd.ttf seems to have done the trick. I'll update the bug report.

Last edited by jaylittle (2018-08-09 02:10:54)

eschwartz · 2018-08-09 02:04:34

Great.

Does this font crash any other freetype/harfbuzz-using software?

jaylittle · 2018-08-09 02:20:43

Other than Chromium, I have absolutely no idea and given that this all stems from a font file I copied over from an old windows install years back, I'm not sure it matters much either.

electropura · 2018-08-09 04:32:14

I also had tahoma fonts from some old windows install on my machine which almost made firefox unusable. I can confirm that removing tahoma seems to fix the problem.

jaylittle · 2018-08-09 10:27:24

Looks like the bug report comment thread blew up overnight. According to it, it also looks like there is a new version of harfbuzz out, 1.8.7, which resolves the issue. I upgraded everything and restored my tahoma fonts and the issue appears to be resolved.

Arch Linux

#1 2018-08-08 23:36:47

[SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#2 2018-08-08 23:43:08

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#3 2018-08-09 00:56:30

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#4 2018-08-09 01:02:29

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#5 2018-08-09 01:10:35

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#6 2018-08-09 01:13:51

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#7 2018-08-09 01:15:24

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#8 2018-08-09 01:22:34

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#9 2018-08-09 01:30:59

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#10 2018-08-09 01:46:53

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#11 2018-08-09 01:53:31

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#12 2018-08-09 02:04:34

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#13 2018-08-09 02:20:43

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#14 2018-08-09 04:32:14

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

#15 2018-08-09 10:27:24

Re: [SOLVED] icu upgrade breaks Firefox and Chromium

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