Firefox web browser error: Pages not loading, browser crashes

There has been a major crash in Mozilla’s Firefox web browser since Thursday morning. Several users reported browser crashes and sites not loading on social media. These issues also occur in Heise’s online editorial section with the recently published version 96 of the web browser and earlier.

Posts on redditand Twitter and im Mozilla bug tracker forum It indicates that the problems are widespread internationally. The crash site allestören.de does not launch Firefox directly – however, if you look at the entry for Web.de, a frequent homepage in Firefox, you will find hundreds of crash reports since around 8 am.

Possible solutions

Various solutions can be found online that can help solve the problems. On Reddit, for example, a user reported that he was able to bypass the Firefox error by setting HTTP3 support in “network.http.http3.enabled” to “false” in the about:config menu (the entry in the address bar).

Other users have reported successfully turning off remote tracking data. In heise’s online test, both tracks resulted in success after a reboot.

Firefox version 96 was released on January 11th and is working smoothly at the moment. On the support forum, users are speculating that Mozilla must have released a faulty update overnight. There is still no statement from Mozilla about the massive failures of Firefox. It is also unclear whether all users or certain hardware and operating system configurations are affected.

Update 11:30 am: I Mozilla Bug Tracker Developer Gian Carlo Pascoto explains, “Google Cloud Load Balancer (or a similar service from CloudFlare) is suspected. An HTTP/3 update may cause errors found in the HTTP/3 implementation of Firefox. This would explain why the error did not appear on what It appears through an update of the Firefox browser itself.

Mozilla may also use the same load balancing services mentioned above, which means that the error can occur regardless of which tabs are open; For example, when Firefox installations connect to a Mozilla server in the background. This happens, for example, in the context of checks for updates or when sending telemetry data. According to Pascutto, Mozilla now wants to turn off HTTP/3 as a workaround until the actual error is found and fixed.

In addition, there are now reports that the acute problem no longer occurs. It is possible that affected load balancers are temporarily refusing HTTP/3 connections to Mozilla browser to get around the error.

(Duha)