1893886 - Firefox immediately closing on startup

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Widget: Win32, defect)

Description

[William]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 OPR/107.0.0.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open Firefox.

Actual results:

It immediately closed.

Expected results:

It should have stayed open.

Comment 1

[William]

Attachment: Video showing the closing

Comment 2

[William]

I've had this problem for about 6 months now. I open Firefox, it closes. I have looked in Microsoft Family Safety settings but haven't seen any switch that would only allow Edge. Renaming firefox.exe to something like firefox1.exe does work and allows me to open Firefox however when Firefox updates it breaks. I am also unable to set firefox1.exe as a default browser. This just randomly started happening one day. I have run several anti-viruses and have completely deleted Firefox off my computer. Both Chrome and Opera work fine. Refreshing Firefox and opening it in troubleshoot mode does nothing.

Comment 3

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug is invalid.
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Comment 4

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Moving this over to a potential component as I am not sure where this would fit best. If this is not the right, please change to a more suitable one.
Thanks!

Comment 5

[Ray Kraesig [:rkraesig]]

Renaming firefox.exe to something like firefox1.exe does work and allows me to open Firefox however when Firefox updates it breaks.

Well, that's horrifying. I've never seen anything like this, but I'll ask around. In the meantime:

• You've implied that you've tried reinstalling, but was that using the same installer? That is, does this still happen if you download a fresh Firefox installer and install using that?

• If you run firefox.exe -p at the Command Prompt (well, "%PROGRAMFILES%/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe" -p), does the Firefox Profile Manager start? If so, can you start Firefox with a new profile?

• Does this happen with Firefox Nightly?

• Per Reddit: do either of HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options have firefox.exe listed beneath them?

Comment 6

[William]

(In reply to Ray Kraesig [:rkraesig] from comment #5)

Renaming firefox.exe to something like firefox1.exe does work and allows me to open Firefox however when Firefox updates it breaks.

Well, that's horrifying. I've never seen anything like this, but I'll ask around. In the meantime:

• You've implied that you've tried reinstalling, but was that using the same installer? That is, does this still happen if you download a fresh Firefox installer and install using that?

• If you run firefox.exe -p at the Command Prompt (well, "%PROGRAMFILES%/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe" -p), does the Firefox Profile Manager start? If so, can you start Firefox with a new profile?

• Does this happen with Firefox Nightly?

• Per Reddit: do either of HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options have firefox.exe listed beneath them?

I have used several different installers.

Running that command loads up a window named, "Firefox - Choose User Profile" however clicking "Start Firefox" just closes the window and sometimes the Firefox troubleshoot window appears.

It appears Firefox Nightly works just fine. I wasn't aware Firefox Nightly existed.

I followed the reddit post by checking the compatibility settings under firefox.exe, none were checked. However I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do with HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options. I tried pasting them into file explorer but that didn't bring anything up.

Comment 7

[Ray Kraesig [:rkraesig]]

(In reply to William from comment #6)

Running that command loads up a window named, "Firefox - Choose User Profile" however clicking "Start Firefox" just closes the window and sometimes the Firefox troubleshoot window appears.

That's very odd. (It sounds more like there's a problem loading xul.dll rather than starting Firefox itself...)

• When Firefox "starts and immediately closes", what actually appears on screen? In particular, if there's a window — do you ever see any actual UI (lettering, icons, interactibles), or do you only see shaded rectangles arranged in a way that suggests that the UI hasn't yet finished drawing?

• If instead of just clicking "Start Firefox", you first create and select a new profile, will Firefox start when using that new profile?

It appears Firefox Nightly works just fine. I wasn't aware Firefox Nightly existed.

Hm... Firefox Nightly happens to install to a different location. If you install a release build of Firefox to a nonstandard location (say, "Program Files\Mozilla Firefox B" instead of "Program Files\Mozilla Firefox"), does it work then?

(If you've run with Nightly, you may need to start Firefox with --allow-downgrade (like -p, above) to load your current profile: profiles store the version number with which they were last loaded, and out of an abundance of caution, Firefox avoids loading (and possibly corrupting) profiles used by later versions. Anything in the v12x range should be interoperable, though.)

I followed the reddit post by checking the compatibility settings under firefox.exe, none were checked. However I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do with HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options. I tried pasting them into file explorer but that didn't bring anything up.

Sorry — those are registry key locations, and are used with regedit.exe. (Guides to RegEdit's use can be found many places online, although it should be fairly intuitive. It's easy to break your system if you change things at random, but it's not easy to change something accidentally.)

Comment 8

[Ray Kraesig [:rkraesig]]

(In reply to Ray Kraesig [:rkraesig] from comment #7)

• When Firefox "starts and immediately closes", what actually appears on screen? In particular, if there's a window — do you ever see any actual UI (lettering, icons, interactibles), or do you only see shaded rectangles arranged in a way that suggests that the UI hasn't yet finished drawing?

Sorry — please ignore this part. On review of the video you posted earlier, that's clearly not what's happening.

Comment 9

[William]

(In reply to Ray Kraesig [:rkraesig] from comment #7)

• If instead of just clicking "Start Firefox", you first create and select a new profile, will Firefox start when using that new profile?

That works for around two minutes until it closes again.

Hm... Firefox Nightly happens to install to a different location. If you install a release build of Firefox to a nonstandard location (say, "Program Files\Mozilla Firefox B" instead of "Program Files\Mozilla Firefox"), does it work then?

This doesn't change anything.

(If you've run with Nightly, you may need to start Firefox with --allow-downgrade (like -p, above) to load your current profile: profiles store the version number with which they were last loaded, and out of an abundance of caution, Firefox avoids loading (and possibly corrupting) profiles used by later versions. Anything in the v12x range should be interoperable, though.)

This also doesn't stop it from closing. (However with the new profile it does still take a minute or two to close)

Sorry — those are registry key locations, and are used with regedit.exe. (Guides to RegEdit's use can be found many places online, although it should be fairly intuitive. It's easy to break your system if you change things at random, but it's not easy to change something accidentally.)

Neither HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options have firefox.exe listed beneath them.

Comment 10

[David Parks [:handyman]]

Hi William. I don't know if you are still seeing this but I've got a few other ideas for you to try.

The "firefox1.exe" rename and this not affecting Firefox Nightly makes this sound a lot like malware or anti-malware (they are often the same thing) targeting Firefox release but not nightly. What anti-virus products were you referring to in comment 2? Do they have a way to exempt Firefox from monitoring (which may or may not be sufficient to stop the meddling)?

Also, since you mention in comment 9 that you can run for a couple of minutes with a new profile -- can you then run with that same profile a second time? If so, on the second run, can you visit about:crashes to see if there are crash report links that you can post here?

Also, can you visit about:third-party and paste the contents here? That will show us if any applications are injecting themselves into Firefox. (External applications can crash Firefox even without doing this, but it is a common way to do so.)

Thanks for the report.

Comment 11

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

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:handyman, since the bug has recent activity, could you please find another way to get the information or close the bug as INCOMPLETE if it is not actionable?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 12

[David Parks [:handyman]]

It's been 8 months. It's not reasonable to believe that the user has been fighting this for so long, and the malware theory was the most probable, so closing as incomplete.