Firefox breaks the internet with HTTP3 support

wanderingfool2 · January 13, 2022

Firefox users last night had an outage which caused Firefox to stop working all thanks to the HTTP3 protocol and the guess one of the backend analytic servers started using HTTP3. The symptoms of the outage was using 100% of a single core and unable to browse the internet with Firefox.

https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/13/firefox-browser-suddenly-failing-to-load-websites-this-morning-heres-the-fix/

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Affected users are simply seeing their tabs spin forever, never completing loading to show the page.

The underlying issue preventing pages from loading appears to be an infinite loop bug in Firefox’s HTTP3 implementation. This essentially causes the browser process to hang indefinitely.

Honestly, I would have thought this would have been better tested before at Firefox. Last night, I actually noticed this was happening when my fans began revving on my laptop (for a second I thought a website in the background might have been trying to mine). I get glitches happen, but it sounds like this has existed for a while now and went unnoticed due to not many sites using HTTP3. I miss the days when web browsers weren't glorified ways of delivering Apps...so many webpages out there are slower to load, have glitchy interfaces (trying to go for style of function), and open up computers to vulnerabilities...I remember when webbrowsers didn't auto turn on features like copy to clipboard (via webpage control).

I have a feeling that one day we will wake up and half the internet is broken by a bad update to the underlying code that no one bothered testing.