webtoons.com freezes Pale Moon 34.0.0 Topic is solved

[ajgelado]

When visiting webtoons.com, Pale Moon 34.0.0 freezes. It worked correctly in 33.9.1.

When you enter the URL, the page starts loading, the title shows in the tab, and sometimes you can see the content. But after one or two seconds, Pale Moon completely freezes, and no matter how much I wait, it doesn't come alive again.

Tested both in my everyday profile, in a private window and in a clean profile. It happens consistently, both in the site's root and in deep URLs. In fact, since updating to v34, the page hasn't worked a single time -- and I have tried over a dozen times, trying to cover different scenarios, before posting this.

It happens in the latest build of Pale Moon x64, 34.0.0, in Windows 11 25H2, with an Intel i3 12100 and no graphics card. I haven't been able to try in other computers yet, but the ones I have access to with an up-to-date Pale Moon version run the same OS and have similar processors. If you need detailed system information or any other information, please tell me. Just remember that, as this is a freeze, I will be unable to access the console.

[Gemmaugr]

Confirmed here to.

It's happened a lot after the update, on various sites, and hopefully it's another issue that'll be resolved when they release to hot fix to the Expat issue: https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProd ... ment-44993

[jobbautista9]

This 4.12 MB(!) SVG spritesheet triggered the hang: https://webtoons-static.pstatic.net/ima ... 8fb105.svg

Regardless of the Expat library update trying to cram every UI image from vector to bitmap into this megabyte monstrosity is a bad idea IMHO. If even just one of the images gets updated that would force everyone who've cached it before to download yet another 4 megabytes of data again.

[ajgelado]

Thank you. It makes a lot of sense. I had read about the Expat update, but had not connected the dots.

I'll wait for Pale Moon 34.0.1.

About the multi-megabyte SVG files that are surfacing due to this issue, well, as a web developer I can understand the appeal of a file that contains multiple items, as that reduces downloads and latency. But why are they so big? Why not separating them in a handful of smaller ones? Also, if you download the WebToon's one and open with an editor (say Inkscape), you see that it contains half a dozen big images and many small, simple icons (numbers and letters inside a circle, quotes, stars and so on). How did it get to 4 MB? Unbelievable.

[vannilla]

as that reduces downloads and latency.

Off-topic:
Reducing the amount of downloads is not an issue and latency actually increases if you cram everything inside a single file. This is not the place to extensively talk about technicalities, but one thing is certain: this "unification" of SVGs is the wrong solution under every front. It doesn't even help on mobile, which is the usual excuse.

[ajgelado]

Reducing the amount of downloads is not an issue and latency actually increases if you cram everything inside a single file. [...]

Off-topic:
I had written a long reply with actual measures that show that, if done right, it is beneficial even with fast cable/fiber connections (not to mention high-latency mobile ones); but, as you say, it's off-topic here. Just one question: do you have real-world figures which support your claim? I surely do. I'm a framework developer with 25 years of web experience and 40 years of general programming experience, beginning in the 8-bit days, when you counted the bytes by hand and used actual chronographs to profile code! You can be sure I never do anything "because Google says so" .

[vannilla]

Off-topic:

do you have real-world figures which support your claim?

No, because I did not measure it as properly as you want from a reply to this question.
Consider that for online web content latency ends when the content is visible or interactable, not just when it is downloaded; anything keeping an icon from showing up adds to latency and if my mobile data is not fast enough to let the browser parse a large SVG that's high latency. A smaller single-image SVG might've showed up sooner as a parallel download of a few bytes.
I experienced this firsthand myself, but I did not see if it was a large file nor do I have pretty graphs to show.

[ajgelado]

I can confirm that Pale Moon 34.0.1 solves this. Case closed -- for now. At some point in the future, Expat will have to be updated again. But now we know more about its quirks, and hopefully can avoid any problems. Thank you very much!