1805662 - Firefox snap prints messages to console

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect, P3)

Description

[sandals]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:107.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/107.0

Steps to reproduce:

Using the firefox snap provided in Ubuntu 22.10, I ran firefox https://www.google.com.

Note that this also happens when the BROWSER environment variable is set to firefox (which is my configuration) and a website is opened by another program.

Actual results:

The following messages were printed to the console:

Gtk-Message: 13:55:45.120: Failed to load module "appmenu-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 13:55:45.120: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.

Expected results:

Firefox shouldn't print messages to stderr because it's often invoked by BROWSER, and users don't want their terminal polluted with messages when BROWSER is invoked. Since these messages are printed by GTK+, Firefox shouldn't invoke GTK+ in such a way that it prints messages, or it should suppress those messages by configuring GTK+ not to log them. (It's unfortunate that GTK+ has this behaviour of logging programmer bugs to stderr in the first place, but the GTK+ developers don't see this as a problem, so every individual program has to be fixed. Hence this bug report.)

Note that the requested behaviour is already implemented by the package shipped by Debian in Debian unstable, which does not print messages to stderr when invoked in the normal way.

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'DevTools::Console' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.