Opera crashes Gnome Shell

A Former User

Hey, dev team! Opera has been causing a lot of crashes on my system lately (Ubuntu 17.10, Xorg - not Wayland). I don't know how to reproduce the bug, it seems random, but here's how it behaves.

When switching to Opera from another window, or when opening a new Opera window (not launching the browser, but opening a new window), or when selecting a running instance of Opera from the Application overview, the whole Ubuntu UI freezes in place. I can still move the mouse cursor and my PC continues working, e.g. music or videos keep playing, but the UI is frozen and unresponsive. The clock in the top bar tops ticking, too. It's like a screenshot.

The only fix I have found is pressing my computer's reset button.

I wasn't able to find any pattern to this, but it always happens when I do something with Opera.

Can you try to address this bug? I love Opera, but I'm gonna have to go back to Firefox for the time being. I hope I can return to this browser soon.

A Former User

Try disabling hardware acceleration in opera.

Settings > (tick show advanced settings on the bottom left corner) > browser > system > use hardware acceleration when available > uncheck.

What gpu are you on and, if you are on nvidia, which driver do you use?

illioren

illioren

Hi jimunderscorep,

I am experiencing the same issues. The manipulation suggested does not solve them.
I am running an Nvidia 1070 with proprietary drivers (984.90) on Ubuntu 17.10.
I have noted some graphic stuttering of the desktop when opera is running - and it all ends up crashing when opening a new window (not 100% of the time, but very often)... The mouse still moves, but the UI remains inert. After waiting a few minutes in that state, the mouse becomes extremely laggy.

I hope this helps a bit.

A Former User @Guest

@jimunderscorep Hey Jim, sorry for the late reply!

The behaviour that illioren described above is very similar to mine, except I don't think I experienced lagging before the whole system UI froze. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell you whether disabling hardware acceleration would have made a difference, because I ended up uninstalling Opera on my desktop PC.

Soon after, my PC started exhibiting the desktop stuttering that illioren described (to be clear, this was after uninstalling Opera). I completely stopped using my desktop PC at that point. I've been working from my laptop over the past weeks, which still runs on Ubuntu 17.04. Opera continues to run perfectly here.

When I get around to it, I will uninstall Ubuntu 17.10 on my desktop PC and go back to 17.04.

In the meantime, it looks like this is an issue only on Ubuntu 17.10.

A Former User @Guest

@jimunderscorep Additional information:

NVidia GTX 970 GPU
Driver versions: the problem occured with both 387.34 and 384.98

Thanks for responding and looking into this!

A Former User

Sorry guys, no idea

A Former User

same problem here. Tried with Ubuntu 17.10, Fedora 27. Wayland and Xorg with both distros. I can switch to a text-console ctrl-alt-f3 if I'm quick enough. top shows opera taking all cpu and gnome-shell eating memory fast. My machine has plenty of ram, but when gnome-shell starts to go to swap then the whole machine goes unresponsive. killing opera or gnome-shell resolves the problem.

A Former User

Hey everybody, I might have a solution.

In Opera, go to opera://gpu (or chrome://gpu). You will likely see that video encode and decode are done by software, not hardware accelerated. Probably some other things as well.

Go to opera://flags (or chrome://flags), and enable the option, "Override software rendering list". Close and re-open Opera. You will see that videos are now hardware-accelerated.

More info: http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/enable-hardware-acceleration-in-chrome.html

While you're at it, you could also go ahead and enable hardware acceleration in Firefox. Google "Ubuntu Firefox enable hardware acceleration", it's one of the first results.

I don't know for sure whether this really fixes our problem. It did solve stuttering issues for me, which I continued to experience on my desktop PC on 17.10 after uninstalling Opera, and then again after switching to Mint 18.3. After my switch to Mint, I also had stuttering in ZSNES, which went away after I did the following:

Open NVidia settings
In "OpenGL Settings", disable "Allow Flipping" and move "Image Settings" slider to the right until it says "Performance".
You could also try disabling VSync (also in OpenGL Settings). If you get no screen tearing afterwards, leave it off.
In "PowerMizer", set "Preferred Mode" to "Prefer Maximum Performance".

The "PowerMizer" setting is automatically reset after reboot. To make it permanent, open the "Startup Applications" app and add the following as a new startup application:

nvidia-settings -a '[gpu:0]/GPUPowerMizerMode=1'

Name and describe as you see fit. More info: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/832288/how-to-automatically-set-powermizer-to-prefer-maximum-performace-with-340-and-346-drivers/?offset=3

Since I'm no longer on 17.10 on my desktop and I still use my laptop for daily work, I can't tell for sure whether any of the above fixes our problem. It would be awesome if one of you guys could report back.