Questionable behaviour by Firefox 65.0.1 because of data processing for fonts?

English Applications
1

I wonder about the system behaviour of the software “MozillaFirefox 65.0.1-1.3” since recent updates.
The opened documents are not immediately displayed in the way I was used to for a while. The tabs present empty windows.
If I inspect the corresponding subprocesses by the program “strace”, I get information like the following.

…
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/fonts/texlive-…/….pfb", O_RDONLY) = 257
…

Would you like to clarify any data processing difficulties around such software components?

2

I’m not sure that’s a problem.

It is not unusual for firefox to be accessing fonts. And if you have some texlive fonts on your system, I suppose it could use those.

3
  • I agree that font data are required for the graphical display of text information.
  • My observation of read accesses for font files from the software distribution “TeX Live” during a few program traces might distract from other difficulties in the current software combination.
  • May I expect readable contents from HTML documents within a few seconds instead of wondering about blank windows still after several minutes?
4

I seem to recall noticing a bug report or a factory mailing list message about font problems slowing firefox. So this is probably being investigated.

5

Do I need to add my observation about insufficient program execution speed (responsiveness) to any other issue tracker?
Would you like to share any more experiences for corresponding software profiling?

6

This appears to be the related bug report:

Bug 1124816 - Firefox freezes intermittently burning 100% CPU due to fontconfig 2.13.1-1.1 update

It is currently marked as “In progress”. It might be worth taking a look. And you can add a comment if you think that is appropriate.

Personally, I do most of my browsing on Leap 15.0, which maybe why I have not noticed the issue.