Closed Bug 205129 Opened 22 years ago Closed 22 years ago

Crash or hang if Mozilla Firebird gets started with fresh profile

Categories

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P1)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Bookmarks & History
Platform:
x86
Windows XP
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
VERIFIED FIXED
Milestone:
Firebird0.7

People

(Reporter: wodzicki, Assigned: p_ch)

References

Details

(Keywords: crash, hang, helpwanted)

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021207 Phoenix/0.5 Build Identifier: Phoenix nightly 04-May-2003 09:14 When the above problem occurs with phoenix, at the same time other browsers have no difficulty opening www.mozilla.org Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.click on phoenix.exe in the phoenix installation directory 2. 3. Actual Results: Precisely what I wrote above Expected Results: phoenix should have open the stat up URL (as stable phoenix-0.5 does)
Reporter: Can you still reproduce with your clean profile? worksforme w/ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030504 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Severity: blocker → critical
WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030511 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Mariusz, can you please try a current nightly with a fresh profile.
I get the same problem on my dual cpu Win 2k Dell. It just freezes at startup after opening the initial window with no content. According to the Windows task manager the process goes non-responsive immediately, but it chews around 30% cpu (on a dual box, so that is really 60% of one cpu) for a while with a lot of disk thrashing, then after 20 seconds or so it just spins at 50% cpu (=100% of one cpu). It's in an infinite loop clearly. It has always done this - it has never worked no matter which version I've used. Latest attempt is 0.6 and it fails too. This is with a fresh profile. I haven't tried it on a single cpu machine but I can (and will) do that.
Same issue for me with: - today's nightly build (19 May 2003) - newly released stable mozillafirebird 0.6 I did not have the issue with Phoenix 0.5 With an entirely new profile (all old files expunged), mozillafirebird hangs on startup. Firewall shows it is connected to gila.mozilla.org, but just sits and chews about 15% cpu (Windows XP SP1).
Same issue for me at work with the 0.6 milestone and the current nightly (20030526). And 0.5 never did this. Windows XP, SP1. Same description as everyone else. This problem only occurs for me with accounts that are User priviledge. Administrator accounts do not hang. This occurs for brand new Windows accounts as well as existing accounts, and for new browser profiles as well as old ones. I have a user account at home on another XP SP1 machine and this does NOT happen there, so it may be environmental as relating to being on a corporate Windows domain, where some policy/setting has been locked down that does not affect an administrator. (?)
Ok guys, I think we've got enough confirmations for this bug - there's also another bug opened yesterday on WinXP which I will dupe because of this one so we should try to focus on finding out, what's going on and perhaps to get a reproducible testcase... Richard supposes this bug only to occur when not logged-in as local admin - this would confirm the comments made by Nicholas in comment #6. So can anyone using Win2k or WinXp create a new userprofile with _no_ local admin rights and re-test this one? I currently only have a Win98Se box and I doubt beeing able to reproduce it there... :)
*** Bug 207388 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Confirming _without_ investigating whether this is a Moz.Firebird issue only or if it's also reproducible in SeaMonkey, because this is a very important problem (IMHO). In fact Richard mentioned in bug #207388 that he previously used Mozilla SeaMonkey 1.4 so I suppose he had no problems with it. So if anybody finds out that this is also reproducible using SeaMonkey please feel free to move bug / resolve it as duplicate but I just don't want to leave it unconfirmed for now...
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Seamonkey, or Mozilla 1.4a worked fine for me as did the prior versions of Mozilla. I just want to clarify that for Pheonix I can get my browser to work fine as local administrator, however as a user who is a member of the administrator group it will not work.
Ok Richard - tnx for the clarification... Can it deal with the location of the Moz.Firebird profile? Did you tried to logon to Windows as another user and to start Moz.Firebird with "-p" to create a new profile located elsewhere, e.g. a directory that you previously created with this user-account? => took over the summary from bug #207388
Summary: phoenix.exe on invocation opens a window and hangs forever with message "resolving www.mozilla.org" → Mozilla Firebird will only work when run as local administrator
Via mail: creating a new profile into a different folder didn't made it.
(Reply to #10) That's a strange one, Richard... I do not use the local administrator account itself on any work machines. We have a domain account that is policied into the local Administrators group, and that's the one that works fine. :( I also used a brand new domain account (local user) as a test and it still hung. It's not trivial for me to test with a brand new local-only user on our work setup, but I hope to get to that soon. If it helps anyone, I don't think this is a permissional issue, at least not as it pertails to the filesystem or registry. I am religious about firing up sysinternal's regmon/filemon when things break as a non-admin, and Firebird is not doing anything out of the ordinary before it hangs. It seems to be a logical problem -- I wouldn't put it past being some weird system policy that is somehow set in all of our situations, or a weird patch version on some DLL in the system. Is there any way to run the browser so that it dumps some kind of trace/log of everything it's doing? Or at least enough of something to narrow down where to look?
Guys, I just had a bit of luck. I copied my prefs.js settings from my copy at home into the profile directly and it seems to have cleared up the bug. I am going to try to isolate if it's a specific setting that causes it to start working. Is it normal behavior of the browser to have an empty prefs.js the first time a profile is created? (I'm sure that's a yes, and the browser writes out the default settings after running)
Got it. If I put this line into prefs.js, the browser loads up fine. If I don't, it hangs: user_pref("browser.bookmarks.added_static_root", true); So here's what I see on my end: 1) I delete my profile directory so that Firebird will create a new one 2) I run Firebird, I see the default files created in the profile. Firebird hangs with the "Resolving host www.mozilla.org" or "Connecting to www.mozilla.org" in the status bar as before. 3) I kill the process 4) I open prefs.js and paste in the line above, and save the file 5) Next time I run Firebird, the mozilla homepage comes up fine, and the browser appears not to hang anymore. I also tried this: 1) I delete the files in my profile, but preserved the directory 2) I create a new prefs.js, with the line above (plus the # Mozilla User Preferences line at the top). Prefs.js is the only file in the directory 3) I run Firebird, the mozilla homepage comes up fine, and the browser doesn't hang. That should help, I hope ;) Everyone else, please verify if adding this line to your prefs fixes it.
Adding the line as requested below does work. Thanks for the fix!!!
In confirmation of what Nicholas writes, I checked that my prefs.js file contains at the top the line: user_pref("browser.bookmarks.added_static_root", true); When I reported the problem initially I did not have mozilla, or netscape, installed on the WindowsXP partition of my computer (I use mozilla on Linux partition). After reporting the problem I reverted to phoenix milestone 0.5. Everything was fine again. Next day I installed mozilla 1.4a on the WindowsXP partition and, out of curiosity, I retried the phoenix nightly (that was ~May 10). This time, phoenix did not hang. I haven't had since then any problems with phoenix, or firebird milestone 0.6 I am currently using. My mozilla profile contains the above mentioned line. I made, after reading Nicholas's comments, an experiment. While having all of my browers closed, I removed that line from firebird's prefs.js file. Then I restarted firebird. It started up fine with mozilla.org web page. I closed it and checked prefs.js. It was rewritten with the critical line added by firebird. I tend to think that if this critical line is not present but mozilla profile for the same user is present on the system, firebird uses that profile (in addition?, instead?) and subsequently rewrites its own prefs.js on exit. I wonder if all the subsequent confirmations come from people who have firebird but neither mozilla nor netscape installed on their systems. Mariusz
Great work Nicholas! Many thanks for the investigation and for providing the workaround. So in the end I think bug #205769 seems to deal with exactly the same problem like we do and it might be duped. Nevertheless there are still some weirdnesses about this bug, for example the experience made by Mariusz in comment #17. So I'd suggest to duplicate the other bug and perhaps someone who is able to reproduce this bug can confirm comment #17?
Keywords: crash, hang
Summary: Mozilla Firebird will only work when run as local administrator → Crash or hang if Mozilla Firebird gets started with fresh profile
*** Bug 205769 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 206105 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Since bug 205769 is now effectively dead, I would like to mention something that I included in a comment 12 there that might be more practical than manually editing each profile or relying on seamonkey to create it: fix the all.js file that is included with Firebird as a template for all new profiles it creates. That is where the real problem lives, and that is why all pref.js files created from it have issues.
Adding pref("browser.bookmarks.added_static_root", true); to all.js is just a workaround. We can't fix by this solution. -> P1 -> helpwanted
Keywords: helpwanted
Priority: -- → P1
Confirming that I encountered this bug running Firebird 0.6.1 in Win98se, with the same behavior and fix as reported in http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205129#c15 above.
I think we may need to port the fix from bug 201381 to fix this.
-> bookmarks -> 0.7?
Assignee: blake → chanial
Component: General → Bookmarks
QA Contact: asa → mpconnor
As brian suggested, I ported the fix for bug 201381. I also ported other unrelated fixes from seamonkey. Marking fixed. Could this bug be verified by the persons who experienced it? If the problem is still present, please reopen.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 22 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Target Milestone: --- → Firebird0.7
*** Bug 216327 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 215031 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
verifying based on comment in the most recent dupe. Still, if this is still a problem in 08/17 or later, please comment in this bug.
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
*** Bug 216859 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
My 0.1c solution: On my fresh install, when Firebird did hang, I waited for a couple minutes, the browser got back to live (any network timeout?), then I opened preferences setup, I entered my manual proxy settings, and voilá! Since then, I can use it successfully, no more hangs at all I reported this networking bug on my bug #205129 already marked as dup of this one
*** Bug 216812 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 218111 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 218253 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 218505 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 217566 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 218848 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 218582 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Firefox crashed and my bookmarks were lost. I think the issue has not been resolved. I am running Windows XP SP1 and FireFox 0.8.
sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change
QA Contact: mconnor → bookmarks
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