1506401 - Firefox 63.0.1 doesn't start on Crostini (Chrome OS)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Dan Dascalescu]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 11021.56.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.76 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Download Firefox from https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/63.0.1/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-63.0.1.tar.bz2
2. `tar xvjf firefox-63.0.1.tar.bz2 && cd firefox`
3. `./firefox`


Actual results:

XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /home/dandvexternal/firefox/libxul.so:
libdbus-glib-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Couldn't load XPCOM.


Expected results:

Firefox should launch.

The fix was to `sudo apt install libdbus-glib-1-2`.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I do not understand why this should be a bug in Firefox when your OS just had a missing library.
Can you please explain this to me ?

Comment 2

[Dan Dascalescu]

Sure. We want Firefox to be easy to install and use, for all users, right?

Chrome OS is an operating system with large[1] and growing[2] market share, in particular in the education sector, where ease of use is paramount.

I'm a pretty technical user[3], yet when I encountered that error, I had to spend a good 10 minutes between various StackExchange sites and random blogs, to figure out what library to install.

If Firefox could give a more user-friendly error message in this case, that would make the installation experience much easier. I realize that the name of the library may vary, and if it's completely impractical to improve the situation in the code, then at least this ticket will hopefully show up when users search for that error message (this wasn't the case when I searched for it).


[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-pcs-gain-share-in-k-12-in-the-u-s-but-chromebooks-still-dominate/
[2]: https://www.recode.net/2018/3/27/17169624/apple-ipad-google-education-event-chromebooks-market
[3]: https://linkedin.com/in/dandv

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I know that chromebooks are pretty popular but that doesn't make a difference in this case.

Firefox is usually provided by the distribution and not by Mozilla in a package file for the OS package manager.
The package manager makes sure that all required packages are installed (decency tree) and you need this because Linux is no standardized platform unlike Windows/OS X.
The binary tar.bz2 on the "ftp" is mostly for testing purposes as far as I know.

What you basically want is a package file for your OS package manager but I doubt that Mozilla will ever provide one (bug 247293).

Comment 4

[Gyula Palko[:gpalko]]

Marking this Resolved-Wontfix, based on Comment 3