Bug 248224 – [GTK] YouTube player is unresponsive, extremely slow scrolling on pages with video

• Component: WebKitGTK
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Kdwk]

Around WebKitGTK 2.38.1/2, YouTube player pages are practically completely unresponsive, with each input taking seconds to be processed and scrolling only happening once every few seconds. This unresponsiveness does not occur on the YouTube main page nor during inline playback on the YouTube main page. It also does not occur with embedded YouTube players or other videos.

[Michael Catanzaro]

Can't reproduce this.

[Kdwk]

Update: after some testing, I have found all MiniBrowsers, including the one from manually building org.gnome.Platform, doesn't freeze up on the YouTube player page.

[Kdwk]

Update: another user is able to reproduce the issue: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249926

[Michael Catanzaro]

*** Bug 249926 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Michael Catanzaro]

(In reply to kdwkleung from comment #2)
> Update: after some testing, I have found all MiniBrowsers, including the one
> from manually building org.gnome.Platform, doesn't freeze up on the YouTube
> player page.

What happens if you run MiniBrowser with WEBKIT_FORCE_SANDBOX=1?

[Carlos Garcia Campos]

(In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #5)
> (In reply to kdwkleung from comment #2)
> > Update: after some testing, I have found all MiniBrowsers, including the one
> > from manually building org.gnome.Platform, doesn't freeze up on the YouTube
> > player page.
> 
> What happens if you run MiniBrowser with WEBKIT_FORCE_SANDBOX=1?

Even better MiniBrowser --enable-sandbox. I think he already tried and problem was still there. He also tried disabling the adblocker in ephy, which might be another difference between ephy and MB, but no luck either.

[Sergio Villar Senin]

(In reply to Carlos Garcia Campos from comment #6)
> (In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #5)
> > (In reply to kdwkleung from comment #2)
> > > Update: after some testing, I have found all MiniBrowsers, including the one
> > > from manually building org.gnome.Platform, doesn't freeze up on the YouTube
> > > player page.
> > 
> > What happens if you run MiniBrowser with WEBKIT_FORCE_SANDBOX=1?
> 
> Even better MiniBrowser --enable-sandbox. I think he already tried and
> problem was still there. He also tried disabling the adblocker in ephy,
> which might be another difference between ephy and MB, but no luck either.

I've just tried with MB distributed in the Debian package and I got the very same result, the page freezes when trying to scroll.

[Kdwk]

Ambient Mode (YouTube -> turn on Dark Mode -> open a video -> video settings -> Ambient Mode) apparently makes this worse, although without Ambient Mode YouTube is already unusable enough.

[Kdwk]

Ambient Mode (YouTube -> turn on Dark Mode -> open a video -> video settings -> Ambient Mode) apparently makes this worse, although without Ambient Mode YouTube is already unusable enough.

[Kdwk]

I've acquired a new machine, and YouTube didn't freeze the first time I visited the site on the machine. After that, it always freezes, even after I deleted the entire mesa_shader_cache folder.

[Kdwk]

I'm pretty sure the comments section is to blame. I just opened a YouTube video again and the comments section failed to appear for some reason. The page was smooth and did not freeze.

[Kdwk]

Created attachment 465100 [details]
Capture of Epiphany refusing to load YouTube when there's Sysprof looking over its shoulder, with memory allocations

I was advised to do a Sysprof capture of YouTube player being unresponsive, but YouTube doesn't load whenever Sysprof is recording, so here's the Sysprof capture of that instead.

[Kdwk]

Created attachment 465179 [details]
Sysprof capture of YouTube player page in Epiphany

I finally got a YouTube player page to load while being recorded by Sysprof. Here's the syscap of me trying to scroll on the YouTube player page.

[Kdwk]

I have new progress in investigating why YouTube player pages freeze when I'm logged in to Google but not when I'm logged out...

When I'm logged in and open a player page, the console always have this line of error: `[Error] Failed to load resource: Error reading data from TLS socket: An unexpected TLS packet was received. (generate_204, line 0)`

While player page when not logged in (in Incognito mode) would not have this error. Incognito mode, logged in, would have this error too.

The curl request is for the resource (taken from Web Inspector -> Network):

curl 'https://rr2---sn-ibj-i3be6.googlevideo.com/generate_204' \
-X 'GET' \
-H 'Accept: image/webp,image/avif,video/*;q=0.8,image/png,image/svg+xml,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5' \
-H 'Referer: https://www.youtube.com/' \
-H 'Sec-Fetch-Dest: image' \
-H 'Sec-Fetch-Mode: no-cors' \
-H 'Sec-Fetch-Site: cross-site' \
-H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.4 Safari/605.1.15'

[Kdwk]

Another discovery:

When installed as a web app, YouTube doesn't freeze even when logged in.

still slow

[Kdwk]

Fixed with Skia (WebKitGTK 2.45.x)