Fix for Firefox Linux sleep bug is live, but you'll have to wait to get it

Firefox has finally fixed a Linux bug that could keep your PC awake long after you were done using the browser. The issue has already landed in Firefox Nightly and is scheduled to ship with Firefox 155, although stable users will have to wait a little longer before they receive it.

The bug, tracked as Bug 2057365, was one of those problems that could be surprisingly difficult to trace. Some Linux users noticed their computers refusing to suspend after Firefox had been running for a while, even when no media appeared to be playing. Running gnome-session-inhibit –list would often point the finger at Firefox with the message firefox: Playing video (suspend), despite there being “no any tab playing video,” as the original bug report describes.

The culprit turned out to be Firefox’s GTK implementation on Linux. A muted or silent video running in the background could continue holding a wake lock, preventing GNOME from suspending the system. Since Firefox doesn’t display a playback indicator for muted or silent video, users had no obvious way of knowing what was keeping their computer awake.

With this fix in place, when a video-playing tab moves into the background, Firefox now releases the suspend inhibitor instead of keeping it active. Audible background playback continues to be handled separately, so music or other audio that is intentionally playing in the background won’t be affected.

The issue is described as “a muted autoplay video in a background tab or subframe still takes the ‘video-playing’ wake lock,” which caused GTK to block system sleep “with no user-visible signal.” After the change, Firefox releases both the foreground and background inhibitors when that video is no longer active in the foreground, bringing Linux in line with Windows, macOS, and Android.

Mozilla has already marked the bug as RESOLVED FIXED, and the change is part of the Firefox 155 branch. It has also been approved for the Firefox 155 release notes, with the proposed wording reading, “Fixed Firefox preventing Linux systems from sleeping or suspending after a long browsing session.”

If you’re running Firefox Nightly, the fix is already available in version 155.0a1. Everyone else will receive it once Firefox 155 reaches the stable channel. Since the current stable release is Firefox 153, there’s still some time to wait before it rolls out to all users.

It also arrives as Nightly continues to pick up other under-the-hood improvements. We recently reported that Firefox Nightly added support for QUIC v2, a newer version of the transport protocol that can improve network performance, and Mozilla has also been testing its upcoming Nova interface redesign in preview builds.

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