Basilisk aarch64 freezes when visiting coveryourtracks site

[jarsealer]

I tried visiting https://coveryourtracks.eff.org, after the site loaded the entire browser became janky and froze, and i had to restart it for it to work again.

I installed Basilisk with the Linux aarch64 tarball.

Code: Select all

Operating system: Armbian bookworm aarch64 
Browser version: Basilisk 2025.07.04 (64-bit) (GTK2)
32-bit or 64-bit?: 64-bit
Problem URL: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
Theme: Photonic
Installed add-ons: nMatrix, Decentraleyes, CanvasBlocker Legacy, HTTPS Always and HTTPS enforcer
Installed plugins: OpenH264 Video Codec

[Basilisk-Dev]

Are you running this in a VM or real hardware? I'm having a hard time replicating this on my Apple Silicon Mac in an aarch64 Linux VM. If on real hardware, what hardware?

[jarsealer]

Are you running this in a VM or real hardware? I'm having a hard time replicating this on my Apple Silicon Mac in an aarch64 Linux VM. If on real hardware, what hardware?

I'm running on real hardware, on a raspberry pi 5.

I also tried turning off/on hardware acceleration in preferences to see if it kept happening and it did.

Off-topic:
Maybe this happens because the rpi doesn't have hardware video encoding support, and instead relies on software encoding... but not sure what that has to do with a website freezing.

[jarsealer]

To be clear, when visiting the site only that tab slows down and affects the browser. when I click on another open tab (which I had to wait a few seconds for it to respond) everything was normal and responsive. so I switched back to the website and clicked on "test your browser", and 10 seconds or so later it performed the tests normally and was responsive, and I got to the results page.

So it appears this issue only happens on the first landing page of https://coveryourtracks.eff.org.

[Moonchild]

It might be a race condition on the website that only shows up on particularly slow hardware like a Pi. This is always a risk with the current habit of sites wanting to do everything asynchronously. The fact that it recovers when you switch tabs further supports that, since background tabs have JavaScript events throttled (which likely allows the race condition to be resolved). Note: I haven't analysed the site's scripting, this is just based on the described observation, but it's the most likely cause. I don't think it's an issue in the browser itself.

[jarsealer]

It might be a race condition on the website that only shows up on particularly slow hardware like a Pi. This is always a risk with the current habit of sites wanting to do everything asynchronously. The fact that it recovers when you switch tabs further supports that, since background tabs have JavaScript events throttled (which likely allows the race condition to be resolved). Note: I haven't analysed the site's scripting, this is just based on the described observation, but it's the most likely cause. I don't think it's an issue in the browser itself.

This doesn't occur on Firefox and LibreWolf tho. Also the issue happens (on basilisk) whether JavaScript is on or off. Maybe the Goanna engine causes this when rendering the page, on systems like Pis?..

But I agree that this is probably not an issue in the actual Basilisk browser.

[Kris_88]

Also the issue happens (on basilisk) whether JavaScript is on or off.

I suspect the problem is in the video accelerator.
Try disabling animation:
layout.css.animation.enabled = false
in about:config

[jarsealer]

I suspect the problem is in the video accelerator.
Try disabling animation:
layout.css.animation.enabled = false
in about:config

You are right. The page loaded normally after I disabled it.

It was the paws animation on the website that made it freeze.

[jarsealer]

Hmm, this issue doesn't occur anymore with the latest update.

Looks like it got fixed.