71797 - Mozilla fails to fallback to another skin or locale if the preferences point to a non-existent one

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Skinability, defect)

Description

[dylang]

If the preferences point to a non-existing theme (perhaps the Mozilla dir got
clobbered, perhaps the home dir is on another machine via NFS), Mozilla fails to
display a browser window.  Instead it spins its tires and does nothing.  The
only recourse is to manually wade into the config dir, and delete the
user-skins.rdf.  Hardly a good solution.

This behaviour exists in build 2001031208 and some others.

Comment 1

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

This is already reported.  I will try to locate the original and mark this a 
duplicate.

Comment 2

[Keyser Sose]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 53670 ***

Comment 3

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Is this one really a duplicate of bug 53670? That one says to fallback if the 
version of the selected skin doesn't match. I don't see anything in that patch 
that would solve the case of an up-to-date but missing profile skin or locale.

Comment 4

[Keyser Sose]

Marking NEW.

Comment 5

[Robert Kaiser]

OK, let me check if I get it right:

Is this the bug about the following problem:
If Mozilla fails to find the portions of chrome mentioned in
<profile>/chrome/user-*.rdf (the locales/skins the user selected) in
<mozilla-dir>/chrome/all-*.rdf (the installed chrome), it segfaults at startup
instead of falling back to a default.

If this is the problem this bug is about, then 1) it should get a crash keyword
(if not topcrash as it causes most of the crashes you don't see with a new
profile) and 2) the summary of this bug should be changed to better reflect this
problem, e.g. "crash at startup if failed to find selected chrome"

Additionally, it should be set to the component and owner which really selects
the chrome at startup, ad at least get nominated for a milestone prior to 1.0

Comment 6

[Robert Kaiser]

As noone is reacting, and noone is objecting to what I stated, I'm adding crash
and mozilla0.9.3 keywords to get on radars.

If it's true what I was talking about in my last post here, it would perhaps be
good to get this at topcrash list, change summary a bit and increase
severity/priority. (This one is reported very often - we only keep telling the
users their profile is the cause, but I think this should even go into NS branch
because also lots of NS users will be crashing on this after an update!)

Comment 7

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

Reassigning to hyatt since he's da man. Also cc-ing pinkerton since he's in
charge of triage while trudelle is on sabbatical

Comment 8

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

how many users will this affect? how many people have non-existant skins?

Comment 9

[dylang]

Uhm, this is a correctness issue.  You would hope that if your HD fails and your
Mozilla config gets munged during recovery (or it gets munged somehow else),
that Mozilla will reset OOV data from the config to 'safe' defaults, ond let
people continue to use the app.

Comment 10

[Robert Kaiser]

pinkerton: Every user that want to share his profile between different versions
(it's enough to have NS and Mozilla installed, and you want to use the same
profile) and which had anything else than Classic and Modern skins or en-US
locale in use (basically, any part of chrome the other version doesn't have
installed), runs into that crash.

So if someone had any custom skin (or locale) installed, installs a new build in
a fresh directory and launches this build with the same profile, he crashes here
because his <profile>/chrome/user-*.rdf files point to non-existing chrome.

Comment 11

[Robert Kaiser]

*** Bug 86156 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Andrei Boros]

Another similar behaviour happened to me as follows : 

Win95, Mozilla 1.1 (not a, not b), since mozilla doesn't start, I don't know the 
build right now.

Install several skins. It happened to me that with one skin, mozilla won't 
start, it only displays the splash screen and hangs. Looking around (and trying 
to find where it stores the skins) I found the folder : 
c:\windows\Mozilla\profiles\my_username\wierdstring.slt\chrome
Looking around the rdf files I got lost.
 Couldn't these be made more simple for manual editing too?
So I moved all the .jar files into another dir, hoping that Mozilla will fall 
back to one of the 2 skins available at the installation, since no file named 
classic.jar or modern.jar was there.

Didn't happen. What happened is the following : 
After the splash screen, I get a mozilla window that only has a title bar and 
another window with 
title: Downloading navigator.xul
Body: You have chosen to download a file of type: "XML-Based User Interface 
Language" [ mozilla.application/cached-xul] from chrome://navigator/content/
What should Mozilla do with this file?

Window also has the Microsoft flag as icon in the top right corner.

If I press enter, the window is closed and only the mozilla window having only 
titlebar remains, which does nothing.

I closed it, then started Mozilla again. This time, it started to create an 
infinite number of windows (only titlebar with close button on it) and I 
was barely able to kill the task.

Comment 13

[Andrei Boros]

On the previous message : everytime I run Mozilla again after what I described, 
it starts opening windows indefinitely (until stopped by kill task, or system 
runs out of resources and crashes gracefully).

Comment 14

[Andrei Boros]

Another followup : 
Deleted *.rdf in the chrome directory. Now Mozilla starts with classic skin.

If I copy the jar files back, there is not way to get them recognized from the 
Mozilla interface. I will post this again as a feature request.

Comment 15

[Brant Gurganus]

By the definitions on <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/bug_status.html#severity> and
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided>, crashing and dataloss
bugs are of critical or possibly higher severity.  Only changing open bugs to
minimize unnecessary spam.  Keywords to trigger this would be crash, topcrash,
topcrash+, zt4newcrash, dataloss.

Comment 16

[Robert Kaiser]

As bug 86156 is duped here, and fallbacks are generally the same problems for
locale and skin, I'm adding locale to the summary.

Comment 17

[Vedran Miletic]

retargeting

Comment 18

[Philip Chee]

XPFE Theming is DOA.