Hello,
I have a very peculiar problem on Ubuntu MATE 17.10. It already happened on 17.04 and does too on my laptop with UM 16.04.
When I watch a stream or video on Twitch (from the website), it works fine. But if I open a new tab in the browser and get back to the one with Twitch, 80% of the time, the page will be completely unresponsive: can’t click on anything on it and the video is frozen. The sound continues to play perfectly, though. It’ll usually fix itself by waiting a bit (like 30 seconds or a bit more), though sometimes it won’t and I get a message from Google Chrome asking if I want to close the unresponsive page.
It happens both with Google Chrome and Firefox. AFAIK, Twitch uses HTML5 video (I’m not 100% sure they’ve completely switched to HTML5 or if the video itself is still played through Flash). I haven’t seen the issue appear on other websites like YouTube.
I’m pretty sure the issue is tied to something installed by Ubuntu MATE: a few weeks ago, I was on GNOME when I considered to switch back to MATE. As soon as I installed the DE packages (ubuntu-mate-desktop), the issue immediately appeared in my current session, without loging out or starting the MATE session. So, I think that some package installed by MATE starts a daemon or service that, for some reason, interferes with the Twitch website. My first guess would be ffmpegthumbnailer but I don’t understand how/why a thumbnailer would interfere with a website… (I’ve tried to remove it but no change.)
My PC has an AMD GPU with Mesa but I doubt it’s related, as my laptop on which the issue appears too has a nVidia GPU (happens with nouveau and the proprietary driver).
Any idea about this and where to start looking to identify the issue?