325729 - Incomprehensible error message XML Parsing Error: no element found

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

Some problems with extensions (still not isolated) can lead to the following error message:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Line Number 1, Column 1:

This prevents Firefox from starting up. See http://www.elharo.com/blog/software-development/web-development/2006/02/03/firefox-catches-a-cold/ for more details.

I suspect there's an extension bug that caused this problem initially, but that's not what I'm reporting today. The problem is that this crippling error is reported in an incomprehensible fashion that no typical end user could reasonably be expected to understand, diagnose, or debug. 

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
I don't know what causes it though at the moment I can trigger it on demand on my system.
Actual Results:  

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Line Number 1, Column 1:

Expected Results:  
Perhaps:

There appears to be a problem with the extension "Extension name". Automatically disabling this extension.
OK

Followed by normal startup.




http://www.elharo.com/blog/software-development/web-development/2006/02/03/firefox-catches-a-cold/

Comment 1

[Anatoly Kupriyanov]

I have a similar problem:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: jar:file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Thunderbird/chrome/toolkit.jar!/content/global/netError.xhtml
Line Number 1, Column 1:

It appears quite often after nntp-server timeout. And I don't have any extensions.

Comment 2

[Jaroslav Zaruba]

As you might know this happens when a XMLHttpRequest is expected to receive a response with xml-markup[*] yet no xml-markup is present.
(I can't say whether such circumstances should be considered an error.)

[*] probably according to content-type response header...?

Comment 3

[Mehyar]

On Seamonkey, I changed my profile from an old one back to the new one and since then I keep getting the above error message, preventing me from opening Seamonkey. Not only I don't have access to the internet, my emails are now also unaccessible. Any suggestions to at least have access to my emails would be much appreciated. Thank you.

ps maybe all in one application is not such a good idea after all!