1811975 - firefox starts on login but does not show a window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1813500

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

Description

[Daniel Essin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:108.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/108.0

Steps to reproduce:

Fedora 37, cinnamon, firefox 108.0.2
Every time I log in firefox apparently launched automatically but does not open any windows.

Actual results:

When I try to launch firefox, I am told that it is already running
ps -e shows 3 running processes
If I killall firefox-bin and then try to launch, it works fine
This is reproducible. It has been happening on every login (that is, several times per day) for about the past 3 weeks.

Expected results:

It should not have started automatically or it should simply open a new window if it is already running and gets another launch request.

Perhaps this is a Fedora issue, but no other GUI apps are launching silently on login.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

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

Firefox looks frozen, can you try to get a backtrace? see
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Debugging_guidelines_for_Mozilla_products#Attach_debugger_to_running_application

Can you also try Mozilla binaries?
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Firefox_problems#Testing_Mozilla_binaries

Thanks.

Comment 3

[Daniel Essin]

Well, there has been another kernel update and today it is not behaving abnormally. I will need to wait to see if the problem recurs.
If it happens, I will try to attach the debugger. Since it's not actually crashing, just sitting invisible in the background, I'm not sure that getting crash dumps would be relevant. It doesn't "crash" until I kill it.

Comment 4

[Daniel Essin]

Apparently not fixed by latest update. Had a system freeze while doing nothing in particular on the desktop.
I used SSH to root from another box to kill the cinnamon session.
After that the login screen was also frozen so I forced a reboot.
After logging back after the reboot I tried to launch firefox and again got the "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile." message

So I ran this:
ps ax|grep fire
8124 tty2 Sl+ 0:00 /opt/firefox/firefox-bin https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?329721-Fedora-37-destop-frozen-after-suspend&goto=newpost
8128 tty2 Sl+ 0:00 /opt/firefox/firefox-bin https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?329721-Fedora-37-destop-frozen-after-suspend&goto=newpost
8136 tty2 Sl+ 0:00 /opt/firefox/firefox-bin https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?329721-Fedora-37-destop-frozen-after-suspend&goto=newpost
and
ps -e|grep fire
8124 tty2 00:00:00 firefox-bin
8128 tty2 00:00:00 firefox-bin
8136 tty2 00:00:00 firefox-bin

Then tried to attach gdb per suggestion above. Firefox has not crased, it is running but invisible.
gdb firefox ps ax|grep firefox/firefox|grep -v grep|grep -v "contentproc"|cut -d ' ' -f3
gdb says:
gdb) set logging on crash_bt.log
"on" or "off" expected.
(gdb) thread apply all bt full
(gdb) print DumpJSStack()
No symbol table is loaded. Use the "file" command.

I don't know what to do next. If I kill firefox then it won't be running and there will be nothing for gdb to attach.

Any suggestions?

Comment 5

[Darkspirit]

Does this help? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-already-running-not-responding
If it doesn't help, please open about:support, click on "Copy text to clipboard" and paste it here. Thanks.

Comment 8

[Daniel Essin]

I have 2 general comments that are prompted by my recent experience:
1 - Limit the release of versions with new features to only 1 or two times a year at no less than 6 month intervals
2 - Limit interim updates to only security related issues and get some incompetents like me to test them before they are generally release.

The problems that I have experience since the first release of 108 have led me to a) remove everything and install 107, b) add firefox to the yum exclude list so that my working version doesn't get overwritten by non-working releases (like the last several).

Overall, in my opinion the features offered my firefox are far superior to those of chrome and it's derivatives, except that the great features are of no use if the app won't even start. At this point I would say that I can't think of a single feature that is missing from firefox. The emphasis should be on the quality and security of the app, not on rampant featuritis. In other words, slow down and take time to get the fundamentals right.

Comment 9

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

(In reply to Daniel Essin from comment #4)

Apparently not fixed by latest update. Had a system freeze while doing nothing in particular on the desktop.
I used SSH to root from another box to kill the cinnamon session.
After that the login screen was also frozen so I forced a reboot.
After logging back after the reboot I tried to launch firefox and again got the "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile." message

So I ran this:
ps ax|grep fire
8124 tty2 Sl+ 0:00 /opt/firefox/firefox-bin https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?329721-Fedora-37-destop-frozen-after-suspend&goto=newpost
8128 tty2 Sl+ 0:00 /opt/firefox/firefox-bin https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?329721-Fedora-37-destop-frozen-after-suspend&goto=newpost
8136 tty2 Sl+ 0:00 /opt/firefox/firefox-bin https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?329721-Fedora-37-destop-frozen-after-suspend&goto=newpost
and
ps -e|grep fire
8124 tty2 00:00:00 firefox-bin
8128 tty2 00:00:00 firefox-bin
8136 tty2 00:00:00 firefox-bin

Then tried to attach gdb per suggestion above. Firefox has not crased, it is running but invisible.
gdb firefox ps ax|grep firefox/firefox|grep -v grep|grep -v "contentproc"|cut -d ' ' -f3
gdb says:
gdb) set logging on crash_bt.log
"on" or "off" expected.
(gdb) thread apply all bt full
(gdb) print DumpJSStack()
No symbol table is loaded. Use the "file" command.

I don't know what to do next. If I kill firefox then it won't be running and there will be nothing for gdb to attach.

Any suggestions?

You can attach gdb directly to the Firefox as:

$ gdb --pid=XXX

and then get the backtrace. Don't forget to install debuginfo and debugsource backages first (you may get them directly from koji: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=2117788 along with latest Firefox package).

btw. /opt/firefox/firefox-bin is not a Fedora provided Firefox package. It looks like a custom installed one.

Comment 10

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

Dupe of Bug 1813500?