1749443 - firefox installation hangs on default-browser-agent.exe

Status: REOPENED

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[Reza Mortazavi]

Attachment: ff-Screenshot 2022-01-11 101622.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.71 Safari/537.36 Edg/97.0.1072.55

Steps to reproduce:

from this morning both Firefox and Firefox developer edition on my pc stopped working with Firefox is not responding message. restarting PC and refreshing Firefox and creating another profile didn't work. so I downloaded the latest installer and tried updating Firefox. installer stopped on Execute C:...\default-browser-agent.exe register-task 308046. I waited an hour before reporting the bug.

Actual results:

firefox stopped / crashed

Expected results:

it should work normally

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Thanks for the report! We've not seen this issue before, so we'd like some additional debugging. If you run the installer again and see this, could you look for events in the Windows event viewer? Some overview documentation is here: https://www.howtogeek.com/123646/htg-explains-what-the-windows-event-viewer-is-and-how-you-can-use-it/. The exact place that the messages from our software would appear is under:

Event Viewer (local)
  > Windows Logs
    > Application

and the events will be labelled like Firefox Default Browser Agent. I'll try to attach a quick screenshot to show what I mean. A screen capture of any events like those that you see would help us understand if there's an obvious issue on your system. Thanks!

Comment 2

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2022-01-18 at 1.36.17 PM.png

Comment 3

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Closing the bug for now for inactivity. We can reopen it if we hear back from the reporter.

Comment 4

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

:nalexander I can recreate this in the Windows Sandbox with a unofficial branded local release build. It seems to relate to the system not yet having a VC Redistributable, but I'm guessing that packages something else we would need, e.g. vcruntime140_1.dll Bug 1691782.

Comment 5

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

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:nrishel, since the bug has recent activity, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 6

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Clearing, ni no longer necessary from reporter.

Comment 7

[Reza Mortazavi]

The problem shortly disappeared after initial report so I couldn't recreate the error and gave up.

Comment 8

[Aaron Miller]

Attachment: Screenshot 2024-08-20 150553.jpg

Comment 9

[Aaron Miller]

I have this exact issue happening to all the machines I have tried to install 128.1 ESR on. Both via PDQ deploy and direct download of "Firefox Setup 128.1.0esr.exe".
I have also tried with 115.14 installed and uninstalled and system restarted prior to calling "Firefox Setup 128.1.0esr.exe".
There is nothing in EventViewer >> Windows Logs >> Applicaiton that resembles Firefox or Firefox Default Browser Agent.
This had been on both Windows 10 and 11 with the latest August updates installed.

Comment 10

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

Hmm, I am unable to reproduce the problem.

@nrishel I see that you found a way to reproduce it. Is it expected that a user would hit it persistently like this? From comment 4, I'm guessing that the answer is "yes". Perhaps we ought to increase the severity. This sounds serious to me if we are leaving users with no way to install Firefox without special knowledge.

Comment 11

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Symptoms have changed since I last recreated. It no longer warns about vcruntime140_1.dll but the installer still hangs on Firefox Background Tasks fails to launch on startup (you can test by exiting the background tasks). It's not absolutely clear to me that what I'm seeing is related (Windows Sandbox is very stripped down) but resolving issues there would rule out missing dependencies problems.

At this point I don't think this is common, and debugging would likely take effort beyond the impact (if unrelated to what's being seen the impact might be nothing). IMO if we put in the effort we would also want to run at least some tests in the Windows Sandbox to detect regressions.

:bhearsum do you have thoughts on the viability of running at minimum an "install and make sure it runs" test in CI for Windows Sandbox, which requires at minimum Windows Pro?

Comment 12

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to Nick Rishel [:nrishel] from comment #11)

Symptoms have changed since I last recreated. It no longer warns about vcruntime140_1.dll but the installer still hangs on Firefox Background Tasks fails to launch on startup (you can test by exiting the background tasks). It's not absolutely clear to me that what I'm seeing is related (Windows Sandbox is very stripped down) but resolving issues there would rule out missing dependencies problems.

At this point I don't think this is common, and debugging would likely take effort beyond the impact (if unrelated to what's being seen the impact might be nothing). IMO if we put in the effort we would also want to run at least some tests in the Windows Sandbox to detect regressions.

:bhearsum do you have thoughts on the viability of running at minimum an "install and make sure it runs" test in CI for Windows Sandbox, which requires at minimum Windows Pro?

If I understand correctly, the goal is to install and run in an environment that we're certain hasn't had some other vcruntime installed on it, to make sure that a minimal system can run Firefox? If so, Windows Sandbox may not be the only way. It might be possible to strip down an existing test image in such a way that we can achieve this. (Although if any of the strictly necessary software we need to connect to Taskcluster requires vcruntime I'm not so sure, unless we can ensure it is placed somewhere that Firefox won't find it.)

As far Windows Sandbox, I'm not sure I know enough about it to have an informed opinion. In general, bringing up a new test platform takes months of effort though, so unless we already have Windows Pro machines that these could run on, that part alone will take awhile. I expect we'd need some additional harness support to run in Windows Sandbox as well. This certainly feels like a medium-to-large complexity thing that will require support from both RelOps & the test automation folks, but I could be wrong.

Once we clarify the requirements we can ask those teams to weigh on.

Comment 13

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

I'll bring it up in our weekly meeting.

Comment 14

[Temciuc]

I also confirm the bug. The Offline Firefox ESR 128.5.2 installation process is stuck on ”default-browser-agent.exe register-task 308046B”. The OS is Windows Server 2016 without internet access. I tried with the last VC_redistx86 and x64 installed, but this didn't solve the issue.

Comment 15

[Joe F]

I also have this issue. Multiple times trying a clean install after removing Firefox using Revo Uninstaller. 143.0.4 is stuck at ”default-browser-agent.exe register-task 308046..." on Windows 11 - eventually the tablet overheats