Closed Bug 1717390 Opened 5 years ago Closed 4 years ago

White/incomplete screen after upgrade.

Categories

(Core :: Graphics: WebRender, defect, P3)

Product:
Core
Component:
Graphics: WebRender
Platform:
x86_64
Linux
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1714483

People

(Reporter: ambrosia_1, Unassigned)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug)

Details

(Keywords: correctness, regression, Whiteboard: QA-not-reproducible)

Attachments

(2 files)

Screenshot from 2021-06-22 16-47-55.png
2.74 MB, image/png
Details
Info from "Nightly" build 92.01a
36.55 KB, text/plain
Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.114 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

This is on Ubuntu (latest x64 desktop version) after a video card upgrade (which may or may not be pertinent.)
.
Tried to open Firefox and I got a message telling me "An upgrade is required." So I downloaded the latest version from the Mozilla website using Chromium. When I opened the .bz2 archive, there was no "Setup" utility, just the "Firefox" folder. I opened the "home/.mozilla" folder, renamed the existing "firefox" folder to "firefox-old", and dropped in the new one from the archive.

Actual results:

When I launch Firefox, all I get is a (movable) empty white box with no buttons or text (I can tell from my pointer changing to a hand that there are invisible elements on the page. Clicking them does not appear to load anything as I can not see the result, but some do result in empty white popups.)
.
I tried doing a full update of Ubuntu, which installed the latest video card drivers, but it made no difference.

I tried going back to the original install but it too now does the same thing.

Expected results:

The Firefox GUI should appear with at least one tab opened.

Hey Tom,
Can you can try to download one of the versions from : https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/ and see if they work for you?

Flags: needinfo?(ambrosia_1)

Thanks for the reply. Problem remains.
I downloaded "/pub/firefox/releases/90.0b9/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-90.0b9.tar.bz2", but I get the same result: An empty white box.
I also tried installing Firefox using the new "Flatpak" method, but that too did not resolve the issue.

I did discover that when I display all open apps (via Ubuntu's "Activities" menu) it is possible to see what Firefox is supposed to be displaying (Firefox left, Chromium on right):

https://i.postimg.cc/N04KQK68/Screenshot-from-2021-06-22-16-47-55.png

Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

Flags: needinfo?(ambrosia_1)

Setting a component for this issue in order to get the dev team involved.
If you feel it's an incorrect one please feel free to change it to a more appropriate one.

Component: Untriaged → Widget: Gtk
Product: Firefox → Core
Whiteboard: QA-not-reproducible

Please run $ MOZ_ACCELERATED=0 MOZ_WEBRENDER=0 firefox, open about:support, click on "Copy text to clipboard" and paste it ħere. Thanks!

OS: Unspecified → Linux
Hardware: Unspecified → x86_64

Or try https://nightly.mozilla.org. If it's still affected, run $ MOZ_ACCELERATED=0 MOZ_WEBRENDER=0 path/to/firefox.

(In reply to Tom D'Ambrosio from comment #0)

Tried to open Firefox and I got a message telling me "An upgrade is required." So I downloaded the latest version from the Mozilla website using Chromium. When I opened the .bz2 archive, there was no "Setup" utility, just the "Firefox" folder. I opened the "home/.mozilla" folder, renamed the existing "firefox" folder to "firefox-old", and dropped in the new one from the archive.

  1. If it's just a broken install:
    Sometimes Firefox shows such a message if it just wants you to click on a button to restart Firefox after updates have been applied.
    To update a preinstalled Ubuntu Firefox, you just need to close Firefox, install Ubuntu updates and start Firefox.

    If you were using the unpackaged binary manually downloaded from https://firefox.com, it should use its internal updater. If you have somehow deleted something in the firefox folder (the folder you have unzipped the tar.gz into, e.g. ~/Downloads/firefox), you just need to replace it with a freshly downloaded one.

    All your browsing data, passwords and cookies are stored as a Firefox profile in ~/.mozilla/. You shouldn't touch that folder. If you use your Firefox profile with a newer Firefox version, it gets upgraded to a new data format. You can't start an older Firefox with such a profile of a newer Firefox (unless you use a specific command line argument and have luck). It would offer you to create a new profile instead.

  2. With Nightly you can check if it's a graphics bug that is either still present or has been fixed:
    My email reply could not be transmitted to you because your mail server does not have a valid certificate (You can check your server with https://www.hardenize.com):

    Just unpack it inside your Downloads folder (right click on the tar.gz > extract).
    Then run for example: MOZ_ACCELERATED=0 MOZ_WEBRENDER=0 ~/Downloads/firefox/firefox

    Please reply on Bugzilla and not via email. Thanks :D

    Does this bug still occur if you run a manually downloaded and unzipped Firefox Nightly with $ ~/Downloads/firefox/firefox,
    but not if you run $ MOZ_ACCELERATED=0 MOZ_WEBRENDER=0 ~/Downloads/firefox/firefox?

    If the bug is still present, you can find out which patch introduced it (at the end you get a pushlog URL):
    $ pip3 install --user mozregression
    $ mozregression --good 2021-05-01 --bad 2021-07-12
    If the bug is not present in Nightly, but was present in previous versions, you can find out which patch fixed it:
    $ mozregression --find-fix --bad 89 --good 2021-07-12

To reply, please add a comment on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1717390. Please don't send me private emails. I can't help you alone. :D

(Tom D'Ambrosio via email)

Sorry for the late reply. (Your solution worked. Thank you. Here are the details in case anyone has this issue again or the problem needs further investigation.)
The install itself did not appear to be broken. As shown in an earlier screen-shot, it was possible to see the Firefox window contents in Ubuntu when clicking on "Activities" (which shows all running tasks in in small windows all on one screen) but not when active:

[attached screenshot]

But when active, all I got was a white box with no visible controls (but the controls were there as revealed by the mouse pointer changing when over them.)

I first attempted to resolve this by downloading the latest version from firefox.com, but when I opened the archive ("firefox-91.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2"), all it contains is a "firefox" folder containing the application files (no installer.)

I navigated to "/home/.mozilla/", renamed the "firefox" folder inside to "firefox.backup", and extracted the "firefox" folder from the archive to the ".mozilla" directory. This did not resolve the issue.

So I searched online and learned of the "flatpak" distribution method for Firefox, performed all of the required steps, but that too did not resolve the issue.

I then resorted to deleting "firefox" entirely in hopes of a clean re-install.

I seem to be unable to "discover" new software using the "Ubuntu Software" utility, and the "Ubuntu Updater" was (is?) no longer offering me updates to a program no longer on my computer.

I followed your suggestion below to extract the "Nightly" build to my "Downloads" folder and run the "MOZ..." command. That worked. "Nightly" is now installed and displays fine.

Thank you. I hope the information helps.

TTFN -- Tom D'Ambrosio --

Blocks: wr-linux
Component: Widget: Gtk → Graphics: WebRender
Keywords: correctness, regression

(In reply to Tom D'Ambrosio)

I followed your suggestion below to extract the "Nightly" build to my "Downloads" folder and run the "MOZ..." command. That worked. "Nightly" is now installed and displays fine.

Thank you. I hope the information helps.

  • Does Nightly also display fine, if you run it without the environment variables (=if you don't disable hardware rendering),
    e.g. $ ~/Downloads/firefox/firefox ?
  • Please open about:support, click on "Copy text to clipboard" and paste it ħere.
  • Please try to find out which patch introduced the bug (at the end you get a pushlog URL).
    $ pip3 install --user mozregression
    $ mozregression --good 2021-05-01 --bad 2021-07-12
    If the bug is not present in latest Nightly, you can find out which patch fixed it.
    For example:
    $ mozregression --find-fix --bad 89 --good 2021-07-12
    $ mozregression --find-fix --bad 2021-06-15 --good 2021-07-12
    You can also directly launch dates to try around: $ mozregression --launch YYYY-MM-DD --pref gfx.webrender.all:true

Thanks!

Please reply by commenting on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1717390.

Severity: -- → S2
Priority: -- → P3

I am unable to get the official release of Firefox to display anything but an empty white box with no visible GUI controls. Nightly runs just fine.

My apologies for the (very) late response, but I was not aware there was one until Mozilla just contacted me. :(

Nightly runs fin using "~/Downloads/firefox/firefox ?". I'm not sure if it disables anything. I "uninstalled" (officially released) Firefox a while back because of the problems I was having with it, and would probably need to reinstall it for "about:support" to provide any useful information. Of course, the problem of not being able to properly install Firefox is the entire reason for this thread.

I went ahead and reinstalled Firefox using "sudo apt install firefox" from the Terminal. This installed FF, but with the same problem: nothing but a big white box with no visible GUI. I can't even see the URL line to paste "about:support" and would not be able to see the result even if I could.

So I went ahead and uploaded the "about:support" results from "Nightly". There do not appear to be any lines containing "mozregression" in the output.

Again, I apologize for the 2 months delay.

What's the console output of ls ~/.mozilla/firefox ?

(In reply to Darkspirit from comment #11)

What's the console output of ls ~/.mozilla/firefox ?

Thanks for the reply.

The path is slightly different for me ("Home/.mozilla/firefox/") which I can't seem to reach from the Terminal, but here's a screen cap:

https://i.postimg.cc/W431hTxW/home-mozilla-firefox.png

Thx again.

Thanks! (It's the same: ~ means home.)

Is Firefox still white if you start it with the following command? __GL_ALLOW_FXAA_USAGE=0 firefox

Thanks for the reply.

Hmm. Interesting! It comes up perfectly using your command! So how then do I fix this?

(In reply to Tom D'Ambrosio from comment #14)

Hmm. Interesting! It comes up perfectly using your command! So how then do I fix this?

Thanks. That means this is a duplicate of bug 1714483 and will get fixed on the next release. Alternatively, disable FXAA in the nvidia driver settings or update to the latest driver version, see https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/180483/en

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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