1689809 - firefox 85 linux hangs on startup

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect, P2)

Description

[samuel norbury]

Attachment: screenshot of firefox hanging and the DE complaining

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox started crashing on startup, so I fully uninstalled it (apt purge, rm -rf ~/.mozilla) and reinstalled it (apt install firefox). Runs the first time, after that it's hit and mostly miss.

During that first time usage I visited the app.element.io website, which asked to use my storage permission which I granted.

Firefox will start up successfully from the terminal when I simply run firefox, but will not start up from the .desktop file in XFCE 4.

So, steps to reproduce:

1. have an n year old linux mint 19.3 + xfce4 install.
2. open firefox
3. login to matrix/element online app
4. close firefox
5. reopen firefox from desktop

Actual results:

Firefox hangs, only showing the window frame. It also doesn't claim to be broken or anything, it will hang indefinitely.

When closing the window (alt+f4 or the close button) the DE will complain that the window/process is not responding, see screenshot.

Expected results:

Firefox opens and runs correctly when started from the DE.

Comment 1

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

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

I think this is Bug 1679933 - at least I noticed that on Fedora and backported this patch to 85.0 shipped there.

Can you please try to kill the firefox process and then go to about:crashes and check the crash report?

Thanks.

Comment 3

[samuel norbury]

Hi,

I killed firefox with a pkill firefox, then opened it and it prompted me to refresh firefox or start in safe mode. This time, safe mode nor terminal startup managed to start firefox.

I then refreshed firefox using the prompt (which uninstalled everything, then reinstalled everything etc) and now firefox starts correctly from terminal and DE.

I'll continue down my own steps of configuring the browser and see if it breaks along the way. This time I have a breakpad.reportURL set, so the about:crashes will hopefully give some info.

Comment 4

[samuel norbury]

Some more steps I took:

• customized looks
• changed search to duckduckgo
• removed other search providers
• logged into bitwarden + remember me
• verified app.element.io + allowed notifications
• changed bitwarden vault timeout to "never"

None of this made it fail. I also cannot reproduce anymore now...

Will do some more testing.

Comment 5

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

When Firefox hangs you can attach gdb to it to get exact crash address:
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Debugging_guidelines_for_Mozilla_products#Attach_debugger_to_running_application

But it depends on debuginfo packages, it works only if you have them installed.

A better way may be to send SIGSEGV signal to frozen firefox process to emulate segmentation fault and that should be caught by mozilla crashreporter and should be visible at about:crashes then.

Go to terminal and you can get firefox PID by:

ps axf | firefox

you should see something like:

6084 ? Sl 10:08 _ /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox

and then send SIGSEGV signal to firefox process by

kill -s 11 6084

Firefox then should crash with sigsegv.

Comment 6

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

Sure. You can perform the above steps when firefox freeze again.

Comment 7

[samuel norbury]

(In reply to Martin Stránský [:stransky] from comment #5)

When Firefox hangs you can attach gdb to it to get exact crash address:
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Debugging_guidelines_for_Mozilla_products#Attach_debugger_to_running_application

But it depends on debuginfo packages, it works only if you have them installed.

A better way may be to send SIGSEGV signal to frozen firefox process to emulate segmentation fault and that should be caught by mozilla crashreporter and should be visible at about:crashes then.

Go to terminal and you can get firefox PID by:

ps axf | firefox

you should see something like:

6084 ? Sl 10:08 _ /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox

and then send SIGSEGV signal to firefox process by

kill -s 11 6084

Firefox then should crash with sigsegv.

I will definitely try this next time it hangs. Until then, thanks for the help, and sorry for the false alarm for what seems to have been fixed by a browser refresh...

Comment 8

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

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:stransky, could you please find another way to get the information or close the bug as INCOMPLETE if it is not actionable?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.