Youtube forwarding video makes palemoon for linux unresponsive Topic is solved

[zelea2]

I keep my debian testing system up to date. In the last month or so, viewing youtube videos in palemoon 29.2.0 (linux) became almost impossible.
I'm on a multi-core CPU and while a video is playing Xorg thread goes to 100%. The video still plays fine bus as soon as you try yo skip
forward/backward the interface becomes non-responsive and the only thing you can do is kill palemoon.

Youtube playback was working fine a month ago. I've tried to roll-back palemoon up to version 28.8.4 and it is behaving the same. This means
that it is a problem with whatever backend is used to play these videos interacting with palemoon.

I want to mention that same videos on the same system play fine in Vivaldi or Brave.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Your profile is now corrupt if you didn't take special care.

[zelea2]

You were right, my profile was corrupt.

I've started fresh, copied my extensions, bookmarks and passwords over and the problem disappeared. Youtube is working fine again.

Palemoon is my main browser for the past 3 years. I should have known better.

[francesco bat]

I have the same problem.
I tried with more profiles, with Basilisk and also with more distro but it is the same result.
Yiutube blocks Palemoon.
I noticed that this happens with uploading comments and related videos sideways.
This is not happen in other pc (notebook).
Maybe it could to be some problem with video card (i have Nvidia).
I tried to change from Nvidia Driver to Nouveau but doesn't solve.
Last test i can to do with win10 in dual boot, but i don't start it from some month and i have the terror of its updates and it could lock my pc for hours and in these days I would like to avoid
Bye
Francesco bat

[seriousness]

I have this problem on my ThinkStation S20 running Ubuntu Studio 20.04. When I visit youtube.com and click anything, palemoon and Xorg processes use 100% CPU. Embedded videos play fine. A new profile and switching to the gtk3-build did not help. I extracted the tarball into my ~/.local/bin/ directory.
Here on my old antiX laptop with Pale Moon from MX repo, everything works fine.

The laptop has radeon graphic, the ThinkStation an nVidia Quadro 2000 with nouveau driver.

[zelea2]

I still find palemoon less responsive as what it was before but at least now it is not freezing anymore.
While playing a video CPU for palemoon is 50%-80% while Xorg is CPU 40%

I do have uBlock Origin and GreaseMonkey with "Google Shut up!" installed so I can watch the videos without ads and without the SignIn prompt.

[passa]

I can confirm that YT became almost unusable for last month or so.

Reading previous comments I tried to create new profile, added the same extension (adblock latitude) and YT suddenly works. It seems as if the comment "Your profile is now corrupt" applies to me as well, but I did not juggle with palemoon versions except usual upgrades (in debian) so I wonder whether just upgrading last palemoon version broke something?

Anyway I have some workaround now, thanks.

[zelea2]

The lag in youtube video playback is bugging me too much.
This happened in the latest version 29.2.0 and it might have something to do with this from the changelog "Updated the AV1 reference library to 2.0."
I went back to 29.1.1 which works fine.
I've pinned the palemoon version in my apt preferences until this is ironed out.

[jobbautista9]

Does the video says that it's encoded in AV1? You can see this by right-clicking on the video and selecting "Stats for nerds".

I don't think AV1 would be the culprit though, last time I tested AV1 it was fine. It's notoriously CPU-intensive though, so you might want to disable it via Preferences => Content => Media Formats. Disable WebM as well if you want to save even more CPU time (since H264 in MP4 usually is hardware-decoded by the GPU, but it's also less intensive to decode in CPU). Remember to enable both of them back after finishing your YouTube session though, some websites might be exclusively using VP8/VP9 WebM or AV1 MP4/WebM, and you won't be able to play them in your browser.

[zelea2]

After some more testing I've come to the conclusion that it's not palemoon's fault, at least not directly and my first post was correct.
I've browsed youtube with palemoon versions from 28.9.3 to 29.2.0 and they all behave the same. The interface is slow and after some fast forwarding and playing different videos
palemoon becomes very slow (not the video playing) with refreshes lasting tens of seconds and the only solution to stop it is with kill.
This time I've made sure to use a fresh profile every time and no extensions at all.
Version 28.9.3 dates from 2020 and at that time youtube was definitely working smoothly.

I can see only two reasons for the current sluggishness (this only dates since about a month or so):
- youtube changed some of their javascripts which are not behaving well on palemoon's JS engine
- some of the libraries palemoon is linked to and are not part of palemoon have changed version and are to blame.
/usr/lib/palemoon/libxul.so alone is dependent of 82 other libraries.
It is not a Xorg library because Vivaldi and Brave work smoothly with youtube on the same machine.

How can I further identify the culprit? Youtube is not working with javascript disabled and there are a lot of scripts loaded.

[seriousness]

My 12 year old laptop has 2x 1867 MHz, 3 GB RAM, Mobility Radeon HD 2400 graphics and YouTube is working fine.

I also use uBO with the default filter lists plus EasyList Germany and don't see any ads.

[zelea2]

Same problem has been reported again here: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=26913
I use Vivaldi for now when I need to browse youtube.
As I said PM is my favorite browser but it's awkward to paste links from one browser to another and if this is not solved in
the following months it will only make me open one browser, the one that works.

[moonbat]

it will only make me open one browser, the one that works

Good for you, after it's been pointed out several times that a service owned by Google works best with browsers based on an engine written by Google. Want a cookie?
Heaven forbid you have more than one browser installed.

[Moonchild]

if this is not solved in the following months it will only make me open one browser, the one that works.

It's just funny how you think you can threaten us with some kind of ultimatum "I'll abandon you if you don't fix this in a few months".

Hey, let me show you something. It's on the home page of Pale Moon:

This browser is released as a community project to aim for open, collaborative development of a full-featured web browser

So, this means if you have a few months in which you're still willing to use Pale Moon, why not use those months to see if you can improve its behaviour on YouTube? The term "collaborative" does mean that you get to be actively involved.

[moonbat]

why not use those months to see if you can improve its behaviour on YouTube

I wouldn't hold my breath

[Moonchild]

I wouldn't hold my breath

I'm not, but it does make a point, doesn't it?

[moonbat]

Definitely - everyone here pitches in in whatever way they can whether it is directly coding fixes or working on extensions or helping out with CSS tweaks and general help.

[zelea2]

So, this means if you have a few months in which you're still willing to use Pale Moon, why not use those months to see if you can improve its behaviour on YouTube? The term "collaborative" does mean that you get to be actively involved.

It's not that I don't want to, PM is my browser of choice, but I don't think I'm capable of helping actively.
I know C and I can compile PM but where to start. If this is a JavaScript problem how can I solve it, I know nothing about JS or its JIT engines.

You've said in another post that this is not possible to debug and maybe it is so. What I would like to see as a mitigation is at least some code in PM that would detect
when this condition happens and closes that tab. It's not normal to have to kill the entire PM because of one misbehaving tab.

What's puzzling is as I've described already: Xorg is at CPU 100%, not PM. strace to both Xorg and PM doesn't show anything unusual when this condition happens.

[Lunokhod]

"It is not a Xorg library because Vivaldi and Brave work smoothly with youtube on the same machine."
It is often more complex than that.
Youtube provides some webgl commands, those might vary when it detects different browsers or hardware. The browser forwards them to user space libs, which forward them to the kernel driver, which forwards them to the GPU, but actually that has a BIOS too, possibly affected by firmware. So what happens is some command says do something that is not supported. Something down the line has to realize it can't be done on the hardware/software combo in question, and then provide a sensible fallback. But that could potentially be done anywhere down that line, or you could get a different graphics card (if that was an option) that could do the required thing, or perhaps it would have a different driver or use different portions of the same driver.
Or then again it could just be some other bug down the software chain.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

Do you actually HAVE hardware acceleration enabled?