severe firefox regression after system upgrade

[ls colby]

Binary package hint: firefox-2

At approx 1:30 am PST on october 15, 2008 I did a security and system upgrade indicated by the upgrade manager. After the upgrade completed I shut the system down. The security upgrade applied to dbus et al and the rest of the upgrade applied to the linux boot environment and kernel; an upgrade from from 2.6.24.19 to 2.6.24.21. This entire upgrade was uneventful.

When the system was rebooted and firefox-2 started a severe regresion was apparent.

Pages that were scrolled stuttered as the were redrawn and scrolling was slow on every site I tested. I created a new extension-less/addon-less/theme-less profile and tested this regression on firefox-2 and firefox-3. The regression was still present. I rebooted the system into opensolaris and the regression was not present on firefox-2, the only firefox version I have installed on opensolaris. This test on opensolaris include running firefox-2 with all extensions enabled - the same extensions I use on ubuntu - and with a new profile. In both cases performance was normal.

On my system, booting is controlled by grub installed by opensolaris. I modified this to ppoint to the 2.6.24.19 boot and kernal environment for ubuntu linux.

I rebooted the system into ubuntu linux and reran my tests on firefox.

The regression was no longer present.

As the dbus changes were still applied, I think the problem is with the linux kernel environment.

I tested evolution, totem and gnome terminal on 2.6.24.21 and the regression was not apparent in these applications.

Interestingly I use an application called celtx - celtx.com - which is an XUL application based on firefox. The scrolling regression was not prersent in this application. Celtx is not an xulrunner application, but uses firefox as its runtime environment. Activestate have a development environment called komodo which is similar. However, I have not tested this application as I do not use this it.

The fix is to boot the previous kernel environment until you guys fix this problem.

Get the word out - those affected will find this intolerable if they do much web browsing.

tia

colby

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Firefox 2 is no longer supported please file a new bug if you see this in firefox3.0