1820719 - "Profile missing" (and potentially other blocking dialogs) should not be shown when automation is detected

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

There are some situations during the startup of Firefox when a dialog might get displayed, eg. if the profile is not reachable or missing. Those dialogs actually block automation (Marionette, WebDriver BiDi) and results in a hang and a potential timeout after a while.

To improve the situation it would be good to print the failure message to stdout / stderr instead and to exit Firefox with a status not 0 right after.

This might help to understand why in some cases Firefox doesn't correctly startup for Marionette and Remote Agent related tests in CI, and that we have to kill the process without knowing anything why it was necessary. Or for Ubuntu when geckodriver is not run in the same Snap compartment and Firefox cannot access the created profile and hangs (see bug 1819377).

Note that for the safe mode dialog we have special handling in Marionette and Remote Agent. Not sure if that would also be possible for these other potential dialogs.

Dave, would you be fine with such a proposal?

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

For actual error dialogs yes, I think we should always print a message to stderr and then it is reasonable to use some environment variable to just bail out in such cases. I'm a little less sure about what would be considered more normal startup dialogs, like showing the profile manager when requested etc.

Comment 2

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:mossop, could you have a look please?

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