Firefox freezes – tried setting gfx.webrender.software to true
Claude says that following a kernel panic, watchdog reported threads held by Firefox GPU helper, even thought I have hardware acceleration off. I tried its suggestion of toggling gfx.webrender.software to true in about:config.
"The watchdog reports at 13:51:55 and 13:52:30 have 11 and 12 WindowServer waits on Firefox GPU Helper [47166]. The stackshot in the panic file at 13:53:15 shows the same PID, so the chain was blocked for about 80 seconds or more before the panic.
- In those reports that GPU helper had been running about 266,000 s (roughly 3 days) and had a 2,294 MB footprint.
- The panic was probably not a single event. The GPU helper was already stuck, WindowServer was already hanging, and the watchdogs fired before the kernel finally panicked at the 45 s framebuffer timeout."
A Claude incident report was recorded.
