328118 - printing hangs browser for several minutes when not connected to printer

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[jsado_sc5]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051013 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051013 Firefox/1.0.7

I have a laptop. Sometimes I am connected to the network that I configured my printer to work from and sometimes I am not. I would like to be able to bring up the printing dialog and print to a file without FireFox hanging for several minutes trying to find a printer that doesn't exist. Maybe if it could be made to only look for the printer if I actually request to print to it instead of to a file then it wouldn't need to do the lookup unnecessarily.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Kenneth Herron]

jsado, what does firefox display as the printer's name? Is it "CUPS/something" or something else?

Comment 2

[jsado_sc5]

It says "Postscript/default".

Comment 3

[Kenneth Herron]

Mozilla doesn't proactively scan for "PostScript" printers. But it does check for CUPS printers. If your laptop is configured with any CUPS printers this might result in CUPS trying to check the remote print servers.

jsado, when your laptop is plugged into your usual network, do you use CUPS to print? Gecko lists these printers in the print dialog as "CUPS/<printername>".

Comment 4

[jsado_sc5]

I could be wrong with my initial description of the problem. I don't see any cups related stuff in the printing dialog. Maybe I never have printed via Firefox on this computer. When I go to print I would just click on the properties next to the printer and enter the appropriate command (lp -d printer). FireFox is showing what looks to be the default printing command which makes me wonder if I have ever configured it to print.

So I guess I am not sure why it is hanging.

Comment 5

[Kenneth Herron]

If your system has the CUPS library on it, then firefox will load the library and perform a check for CUPS printers. If it doesn't find any printers then of course you won't see any CUPS printers in the print dialog.

Firefox accesses CUPS through a library named "libcups.so.2". Could you see whether you have this library or not? It's most likely in /usr/lib though it could be somewhere else.

If your hang is due to the CUPS printer check, you can disable this check by creating a preference "print.postscript.cups.enabled" set to "false". See <http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries#Print..2A>. This will also prevent using CUPS while connected to your usual network, which may or may not be okay.

Comment 6

[Kenneth Herron]

jsado, are you still having this problem. Have you been able to try the suggestions in comment 5 yet?

Comment 7

[Steve Wardell]

I think I am experiencing the same issue on Windows. When I attempt to to use any of the Print options (Page Setup, Print Preview, or Print), Firefox freezes (2.0.0.1). The reason is that the printer is set to a printer that is not accessible in my current network.

When I remove the print.print_printer config item and restart Firefox, the menu options load (since the system default printer is accessible). Could a timeout be added to avoid freezing firefox? Also perhaps allow access to Print and other dialogs even if printer is unreachable so user could select a different printer or printing option.

Comment 8

[Sharky]

I have this same problem.  Running Firefox 3.6.6 on a Windows 7 laptop at home, I can easily print to a Samba printer on my Ubuntu box.  But when I bring my laptop into work, where my home printer is inaccessible, then the first time I try to print, Firefox freezes.  After waiting for a long time, however, it does bring up the regular printing dialog.  I can then switch printers and everything works fine thereafter.

Since Firefox always remembers the last printer you used, it is important, before leaving a network, to print to a printer that is accessible everywhere (such as your PDF writer).  Otherwise, the next time you try to print, Blamo!  You must wait for the printing gods to smile on you.

Incidentally, the last time this happened to me, after waiting a few minutes, I got a pop-up.  It said:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding.  You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: chrome://firebug/content/chrome.js:1242

After I push Continue, the printing dialog popped up right away and I printed normally.

Comment 9

[realgrouchy]

I can confirm that this problem also exists with SeaMonkey (2.0.4 and has for a few versions at least). Running XP SP3.

I like to view my gmail messages in Print view so I can edit save them to HD, but gmail automatically includes a script to print the page. If I don't have a printer connected, it hangs for about a minute before opening the print dialog with a non-printer selected (Microsoft XPS Document Writer on this computer). 

The real question is how to fix this? Presumably if a print command was sent, it's because the user wants to print, and if SeaMonkey were to automatically/periodically search for printers, that would slow down the system if there are none to be found.

I suggest a dialog box that says a message like "Searching for printers", "Searching for default printer", or "Searching for [name of printer]". The "Searching" dialog box could have a 'cancel' button, and possibly even an option to manually select which printer to search for. This box could either appear before the print dialog appears, or on top of it.

- RG>

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to realgrouchy from comment #9)
> I can confirm that this problem also exists with SeaMonkey (2.0.4 and has
> for a few versions at least). Running XP SP3.

Tony, do you concur?

Comment 11

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #10)
> (In reply to realgrouchy from comment #9)
> > I can confirm that this problem also exists with SeaMonkey (2.0.4 and has
> > for a few versions at least). Running XP SP3.
> 
> Tony, do you concur?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 SeaMonkey/2.26a1 ID:20140126003001 c-c:259945c339ef m-c:611698b4a246

I don't see this, but:
- I have no network printer
- I am on Linux and my parallel printer is connected via CUPS
- If I click the "Print this page" button after disconnecting the parallel cable, I get a "Print" dialog with three lines (submenus) in the "General" tab:
  - Printer: Print to File
  - Printer: HP_Laserjet_1200_parallel
    Location:
    Status: /usr/libs/cups/backend/hp failed
  - (greyed out)
    Printer: hplaserjet1200
    Location:
    Status: Rejecting jobs
Clicking the second of these lines seems to "succeed" immediately, but of course nothing gets printed. I tried to see what was queued for printing but failed: "Right-click desktop → SuSE → Utilities → Printing → Manage printing" tried to open http:/// in SeaMonkey, which gave a XUL error page ("Invalid Address — The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded").

Unless someone on Windows tries to reproduce the problem and fails, I would expect printing to be handled the same way on all Mozilla applications, but probably in a platform-dependent way. (But that's a guess, I would expect someone like Neil to have a better idea of how it works on SeaMonkey, or at least, to know who does. See also http://www.seamonkey-project.org/dev/project-areas ).

Comment 12

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

P.S. "lpq -l" answers as follows:

HP_LaserJet_1200_parallel is not ready


(null): 1st                               [job 2868 localhost]
        untitled                                452608 bytes


(null): 2nd                               [job 2869 localhost]
        untitled                                155648 bytes

Comment 13

[Andrei Purice]

Marking this as Resolved > Worksforme since the issue no longer is reproducible on the latest versions of Firefox Nightly 95.0a1 (2021-10-21), beta 94.0b9 or release 93.0 on Windows 10. Though I do not own a printer conected through a network I printed to pdf and the hang doesn't occur for me.
If anyone can still reproduce the issue either re-open it or file a new one.