had a computer scare yesterday evening when Firefox suddenly stopped working properly.

it might have been triggered by a particular website or it might have gone wrong randomly & spontaneously but the symptoms were weird.

it was refusing to display anything at all on pages until I discovered that switching away from the tab and back again would reveal the contents. Meanwhile I had already tried a new private instance to no avail and turning off ad-blocker in case that was the deranged item.

the next part of the bug (once I did have some page contents) was that it wouldn't show any user updates to a page. Eg no scrolling or typing or highlighting unless again I switched away & back. But text highlighting was clearly happening because copy (& paste elsewhere) was working.

was very scared early on that the whole computer had broken but eventually it became clear it really was just Firefox and other programs could still scroll and accept typing or mouse-swipes.

got Firefox booting up normally today - with no idea still of what exactly had gone wrong.

another weird thing was that the Firefox menu of options and settings was still working (with its own scroll & user interaction). It was only the webpage parts which didn't work. And they could still show videos (ie external updates to the page).

that sounds familiar - I think I’ve experienced that kind of lock-up with Firefox before.