1842772 - Firefox stub installer timing out

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1817469

(Firefox :: Installer, defect)

Description

[Mayank Bansal]

Observed this behaviour today while trying to diagnose some other bug.
I downloaded the latest Nightly installer stub from mozilla.

I tried to install firefox from the stub. I observed different type of absolutely weird behaviours each time i tried installation:

1. The installer took a long time, and then errored out (see attached screenshot)
2. Installed the 32 bit version on my 64bit system
3. Installed Nightly on the "C:\Users\<user_name>\AppData\Local\Firefox Nightly" folder!!!!

IMO this is a high priority bug.

Comment 1

[Mayank Bansal]

Attachment: Screenshot 2023-07-11 152244.png

Comment 2

[Mayank Bansal]

Attachment: wrong folder.png

Comment 3

[Mayank Bansal]

Attachment: install.log

I currently have Nightly installed in my AppData folder. This is the install.log file.

Comment 4

[Mayank Bansal]

Attachment: about:support

Comment 5

[Mayank Bansal]

I was using a nightly stub installer that i may have downloaded 4-6 weeks back, and it was working fine till atleast 2 weeks back.
The stub installer i downloaded afresh from Mozilla website today was showing these bugs.

Comment 6

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

1. I confirmed this behavior.
2. The stub installer opens https://www.mozilla.org/ja/firefox/installer-help/?channel=nightly&installer_lang=ja after the error dialog appears. This page offers 32-bit installer (firefox-117.0a1.ja.win32.installer.exe). So I think this is a server issue.
3. I could not confirm this. Did you cancel the UAC dialog? If so, this is an expected behavior.

Comment 7

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

I'm not sure if this is related to the recent bouncer work we've been doing or something else entirely, but can you please help find someone to investigate, Johan?

Comment 8

[Mayank Bansal]

(In reply to Masatoshi Kimura [:emk] from comment #6)

3. I could not confirm this. Did you cancel the UAC dialog? If so, this is an expected behavior.

I think I did cancel the UAC dialogue. I had just double clicked on the stub, but then thought I should try to run it as thea administrator (even though I am the administrator). When i cancelled the UAC, I was expecting the installer to stop/cancel the installation, but the installation continued. I wasnt aware that installation in the AppData was the expected behaviour!

How do i now remove the installation from the AppData folder and install Nightly properly in the Program Files folder without losing any data, file associations, or default browser?

Comment 9

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

When i cancelled the UAC, I was expecting the installer to stop/cancel the installation, but the installation continued.

I totally agree. The cancel button should stop the installation and the installer should offer an option for per-user installation using a different UI. But it is out of scope of this bug. (IIRC the bug is already filed, but I do not remember the bug number.)

How do i now remove the installation from the AppData folder and install Nightly properly in the Program Files folder without losing any data, file associations, or default browser?

Unfortunately, it is not possible to keep file associations or default browser because the executable path will change. Moving profile data is also difficult due to bug 1429838, but possible.

Comment 10

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

Hello, thank you for filing this bug.

I appreciate that this bug is potentially serious, but the Priority and Severity fields are internally used to indicate the results of our triage and the priorities that our team has decided on and are not intended to be used by the reporter to get our attention. In the future, please allow us to set those fields ourselves.

There is a lot going on in this bug all at once. Let me see if I can disentangle things a bit so that there isn't so that we aren't trying to talk about multiple things at once all in the same place.

1. Installer is timing out and giving the error message that it gives when it times out.

Let's keep this issue here and investigate further.

2. 32-bit installation unexpectedly installed.

It looks like what happened here is pretty well explained by Comment 6. I am splitting this issue out into Bug 1842884.

3. Firefox was unexpectedly installed into AppData

This appears to have been the expected result of declining a UAC prompt (see Comment 8). There does not appear to be any bug here; I think that we can just drop this issue.

---

If I am missing anything, please let me know or file it as a separate bug referencing this one.

Comment 11

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

(In reply to Masatoshi Kimura [:emk] from comment #9)

When i cancelled the UAC, I was expecting the installer to stop/cancel the installation, but the installation continued.

I totally agree. The cancel button should stop the installation and the installer should offer an option for per-user installation using a different UI. But it is out of scope of this bug. (IIRC the bug is already filed, but I do not remember the bug number.)

This is Bug 1337218.

Comment 12

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

(In reply to Mayank Bansal from comment #0)

1. The installer took a long time, and then errored out (see attached screenshot)

I am unable to reproduce this problem. You mentioned having several different issues, I believe with different installers. Is this an issue that consistently reproduces with a specific installer? Or is it an intermittent issue with any stub installer? If it's the former, could you please attach the problematic installer to this bug?

Comment 13

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

I believe that this needinfo is more relevant to the work that I split off into Bug 1842884, so I'm going to move the needinfo over there.

Comment 14

[Mayank Bansal]

Attachment: Firefox Installer.en-US.exe

Comment 15

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

I can't reproduce the issue using this installer. When you run it, do you get the same error message consistently? Intermittently? Does it fail conditionally on something specific?

Comment 16

[Mayank Bansal]

(In reply to Robin Steuber (they/them) [:bytesized] from comment #12)

(In reply to Mayank Bansal from comment #0)

1. The installer took a long time, and then errored out (see attached screenshot)

I am unable to reproduce this problem. You mentioned having several different issues, I believe with different installers. Is this an issue that consistently reproduces with a specific installer? Or is it an intermittent issue with any stub installer? If it's the former, could you please attach the problematic installer to this bug?

The process goes into a loop. The entry point is that I have Nightly installed in my Appdata folder and I want it to be installed in the Program Files folder.

1. Run the stub installer. - > The installer will run perfectly fine, and you have firefox in Program Files. But you also have Firefox installed in the Appdata folder.
2. Now I want to remove Firefox from AppData folder. So, I go to the Firefox installed in the AppData folder, and run the uninstaller (that is in the Firefox/Uninstall folder). - > This uninstaller will run, but it will remove Firefox from both AppData and Program Files. Therefore, you dont have any browser on your machine.
3. To install a browser, you run the stub installer again. This time, it will get stuck.
   Rinse and repeat to step #1.

I dont remember how i got into the state of #1 above today. But it is a combination of the stub installer, a full-fledged 55MB Nightly installer, and potentially the 32bit installation.

Maybe :emk can provide additional details here as they confirmed this bug in comment #6.

Comment 17

[Mayank Bansal]

Oh maybe as a preparatory step, run the stub installer, say no to the UAC prompt then it will install Firefox in the AppData folder. Then you can take the steps above to repro the bug.

Comment 18

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

(In reply to Mayank Bansal from comment #16)

1. Run the stub installer. - > The installer will run perfectly fine, and you have firefox in Program Files. But you also have Firefox installed in the Appdata folder.
2. Now I want to remove Firefox from AppData folder. So, I go to the Firefox installed in the AppData folder, and run the uninstaller (that is in the Firefox/Uninstall folder). - > This uninstaller will run, but it will remove Firefox from both AppData and Program Files. Therefore, you dont have any browser on your machine.
3. To install a browser, you run the stub installer again. This time, it will get stuck.
   Rinse and repeat to step #1.

(In reply to Mayank Bansal from comment #17)

Oh maybe as a preparatory step, run the stub installer, say no to the UAC prompt then it will install Firefox in the AppData folder. Then you can take the steps above to repro the bug.

I'm afraid I can't reproduce this. In fact, when I run the installer again after installing to AppData, it simply finds the installation there and updates it rather than installing to Program Files. Perhaps this is what happened when you ended up with no browser on your machine?

Regardless, running the installer again after this works successfully for me.

---

(In reply to Masatoshi Kimura [:emk] from comment #6)

1. I confirmed this behavior.

Can you provide STR that I might be able to use successfully?

Comment 19

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

(In reply to Robin Steuber (they/them) [:bytesized] from comment #18)

Can you provide STR that I might be able to use successfully?

I simply downloaded and executed the stub installer from https://www.mozilla.org/ja/firefox/channel/desktop/#nightly. I guess this problem is intermittent. I tested this on a slow VM. Maybe it is related.

Comment 20

[Mayank Bansal]

(In reply to Robin Steuber (they/them) [:bytesized] from comment #18)

I'm afraid I can't reproduce this. In fact, when I run the installer again after installing to AppData, it simply finds the installation there and updates it rather than installing to Program Files. Perhaps this is what happened when you ended up with no browser on your machine?

I dont quite follow what you mean in these sentences.

Did you do step #2 where you run the uninstaller that will be present in the Firefox installation folder in AppData?

Now I want to remove Firefox from AppData folder. So, I go to the Firefox installed in the AppData folder, and run the uninstaller (that is in the >Firefox/Uninstall folder). - > This uninstaller will run, but it will remove Firefox from both AppData and Program Files. Therefore, you dont have any >browser on your machine.

If you are not able to repro from my STR, I can run some diagnostics build and/or gather some logs etc.

Comment 21

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

The bug is marked as blocking firefox117 (nightly). However, the bug still isn't assigned.

:Amir, could you please find an assignee for this tracked bug? If you disagree with the tracking decision, please talk with the release managers.

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 22

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

@RyanVM - I see that you marked this as blocking firefox117, but it's not clear to me that it needs to block 117. Could we unset that and wait until we have finished triaging/diagnosing the issue?

Comment 23

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

I just spun up a slow Windows 11 VM (2 cores, 4GB RAM) and ran the stub installer attached to this bug a dozen times. I was unable to reproduce this issue. Since the issue appears to be an intermittent stub installer failure, I am going to merge it with another similar bug reporting that issue.