1199423 - Firefox 40.0 print dialog hangs for minutes while discovering network printers

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Print Preview, defect)

Description

[selinger]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Build ID: 20150819100530

Steps to reproduce:

I go to File -> Print (or Ctrl-P).


Actual results:

The print dialog hangs for about a minute. While it is hanging, the print dialog only displays an empty (gray) area, and the underlying Firefox window is also unresponsive. 

After about a minute, the dialog finally populates itself, at which point it contains lots of discovered network printers (presumably these printers belong to other people in the neighborhood; I do not recognize any of them). 

This happens every time I do Ctrl-P or File -> Printer (i.e., not just once per session).


Expected results:

The print dialog should start up quickly. 

I almost always want to "print to file"; I have no interest in discovered network printers. However, I still have to wait for this before being able to print to file.

I'm using Firefox 40.0 that comes with Ubuntu 15.04. I did not have this problem with the Firefox included in Ubuntu 14.10 or any earlier version. Until I upgraded, the only printers that would be displayed were the once I configured in CUPS.

Comment 1

[selinger]

Update: This might be a CUPS problem. I disabled discovered printers as described here:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/345083/how-do-i-disable-automatic-remote-printer-installation
and it solved this problem for Firefox as well.

However, I still think it is not correct that the dialog should hang for so long.

Comment 2

[Justin [:JW_SoftvisionQA]]

Hello,

Are you still experiencing the hang of the print dialog?

If so, could you provide screenshots so I can get a feel for what you are seeing?

Thank you,

Justin

Comment 3

[selinger]

I solved the problem, but not at the Firefox level. I simply turned off automatic printer discovery in CUPS, by editing /etc/cups/cupsd.conf with the lines:

Browsing Off
BrowseLocalProtocols none

and then restarting the CUPS service.

However, while this temporarily solves the problem for me, it does not solve the problem in general. My understanding is that Firefox does its printer discovery in a foreground process. So if a user has printer discovery enabled, and if the discovery takes a long time, Firefox will hang while it waits for CUPS to complete the discovery process. If you need me to corroborate the behavior, I could presumably re-enable discovery of network printers and see if the behavior is still present. Would you like me to do that?

Thanks, -- Peter

Comment 4

[Justin [:JW_SoftvisionQA]]

I will close this bug per comment above.