1562012 - Non-admin users see a blank, unresponsive Firefox

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect, P5)

Description

[Dennis Lichtenthäler]

Attachment: Firefox MSI migration Browser Console.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0

Steps to reproduce:

We are attempting to migrate from Frontmotion's MSI releases (ESR 60.7.0) to the official Firefox MSI installers (67.0.3).
We manually uninstalled the old version, made sure it was completely gone, rebootet the systems, pushed the new version out via Active Directory and rebooted the affected systems once more.

I'll try to provide as much information as I can. If you need anything else, please let me know.

Actual results:

On a large number of machines, Firefox starts up after rebooting but presents a blank window without any content. The address bar is empty, the menu works but most menu items cannot be activated.
I'm attaching a screenshot of the Browser Console during this time. External HTTP requests are not supposed to work as we have removed all Group Policies that might be causing this, including proxy setup.
I'm seeing a NetworkError while fetching resource://activity-stream/lib/ASRouter.jsm which I don't understand.

I have removed the Mozilla folder from %appdata% as well as the Local and LocalLow folders. The folders are recreated when restarting firefox but the issue persists.

After closing all windows, the firefox.exe process sticks around, sometimes until killed manually many minutes later.

Expected results:

We expected problems concerning the "one profile per installed edition" change. However, after removing any trace of previous profiles, we would have expected Firefox to launch normally.

Comment 1

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Denis, could you please add more details on the parameters and the actual steps you are using while installing the MSI? An install log would be helpful as well (/lvx "path_to_log"). The title suggest you are "migrating", but the details hint towards having this issue on a clean env. installation, could you please clarify that point - I'm mostly inquiring about any relevance of the "Frontmotion MSI installation" in the title?

Might be wrong, but I think network errors in the attached screenshot are to be expected since there is no network availability and Activity Stream just states that. Same for the blank new tab.

+Matt: Any thoughts on what the issue might be here or what additional details would be required to follow up?

Comment 2

[Molly Howell (she/her) (mostly inactive)]

Have you tried running another package of 67 on one of the affected machines, like the .exe full installer [1]? The problems you're reporting don't sound like anything that the type of installer that was used could have affected, unless that MSI package itself is broken somehow (but it works fine for me).

[1] I'm assuming you need the 64-bit version, and I've also linked to 67.0.4 instead of 67.0.3 because it contains an important security fix.

Comment 3

[Dennis Lichtenthäler]

(In reply to Adrian Florinescu [:adrian_sv] from comment #1)

Denis, could you please add more details on the parameters and the actual steps you are using while installing the MSI? An install log would be helpful as well (/lvx "path_to_log"). The title suggest you are "migrating", but the details hint towards having this issue on a clean env. installation, could you please clarify that point - I'm mostly inquiring about any relevance of the "Frontmotion MSI installation" in the title?
We have been using the unofficial Firefox ESR MSI installers from Frontmotion [1] for a while. As Mozilla now provides official MSI installers, we were trying to switch over to those.
Both MSI files were being installed without further modification or command line switches, simply by publishing them through Active Directory.
We have been using mkaply's CCK2 wizard [2] to configure Firefox in the past but have been switching over to the new Group Policy configuration.

As described above, we removed the old ESR versions from the affected machines, rebooted and deleted the remaining Firefox directory from %ProgramFiles% so - in our understanding - there should have been no trace of the old versions left.

Might be wrong, but I think network errors in the attached screenshot are to be expected since there is no network availability and Activity Stream just states that. Same for the blank new tab.
I may have misinterpreted the first message in the screenshot I attached. I had originally thought it had referred to an error loading the actual jsm module. That's probably not the case. Excuse the red herring...

I'll try to reproduce the problem with a limited set of machines once more and will try to get a MSI log.

[1] https://www.frontmotion.com/firefox/download/
[2] https://github.com/mkaply/cck2wizard/

Comment 4

[Dennis Lichtenthäler]

(In reply to Matt Howell (he/him) [:mhowell] from comment #2)

Have you tried running another package of 67 on one of the affected machines, like the .exe full installer [1]? The problems you're reporting don't sound like anything that the type of installer that was used could have affected, unless that MSI package itself is broken somehow (but it works fine for me).

[1] I'm assuming you need the 64-bit version, and I've also linked to 67.0.4 instead of 67.0.3 because it contains an important security fix.

I have now. The problem does not seem to have anything to do with the MSI installers as it also happens with the full 67.0.4 exe installer. We're also using the same MSI files on other machines without any trouble. I'll attach the msiexec log file anyway, just in case there's anything useful in it.

I now have a test machine to debug this problem further. I retraced the steps described above and arrived at the following situation:

• Firefox 67.0.4 64bit is installed, no directories of previous installations (Frontmotion's 32bit version) remain
• I have renamed the "Mozilla" directories from %appdata%, %localappdata% and \AppData\LocalLow for all my test users
• A user that is member of the local Administrators group can launch and use Firefox without issues but another user - even with a clean profile - exhibits the problems described above

I can confidently rule out that there's something wrong with the user's setup, group policies and the like, as we are using the official MSI installers with the same group policies and settings on other machines which did not previously have Frontmotion's Firefox MSI releases installed.

I couldn't find any way to make Firefox log anything else despite the browser console messages noted above. Running Firefox with -console produces a new console window but there's nothing logged to it so any pointers would be really helpful here.

Comment 5

[Dennis Lichtenthäler]

Attachment: firefox-67.0.4 msi.log

Comment 6

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:mhowell, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 7

[Molly Howell (she/her) (mostly inactive)]

[sorry for the slow response; been out of the office for a while]

Thanks for checking those things. Since you said a different user can launch that copy of Firefox without issue, the installation itself must be fine, so I think that rules out any installer bug. That also means this is outside my area of expertise, so I'm moving this bug to a different component where hopefully someone knows how to start properly diagnosing it. Also removing the mention of MSI from the bug summary since that's been shown to be unrelated.

Comment 8

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

You mentioned that group policies block external http requests. Are admin users still allowed to make that request? Is there a way you could test this issue without that restriction?

Comment 9

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:mossop, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 10

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Can you try entering something in the address bar and trying to load it and see if any new messages show up in the error console?

Comment 11

[Dennis Lichtenthäler]

(In reply to Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him) from comment #10)

Can you try entering something in the address bar and trying to load it and see if any new messages show up in the error console?

I have tried that. There is no apparent reaction to me entering an address. The autocomplete suggestions, however, do turn up.

I'm attaching a video with the following steps:

• Renamed the "Mozilla" folder in order to force Firefox to create a new user profile
• Started Firefox and entered something in the address bar. Upon pressing Enter, nothing whatsoever happens. The requests for autocomplete results do show up in the Browser Console and are successful.

I'm not sure whether it's relevant but after closing Firefox, the process sticks around for a while. I've seen it exit after twenty seconds or so but upon subsequent attempts it had not closed after several minutes.

Comment 12

[Dennis Lichtenthäler]

Attachment: Video of steps described in Comment 11

Comment 13

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Could you try installing Firefox into a different directory and seeing if you still see the same issue?

Comment 14

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

No response in two months -> INCOMPLETE