431102 - Startup fails with no error message except for first start after profile creation, when Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles can't be created

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Julian Scheid]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_4_11; en) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Safari/525.18
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008042704 Minefield/3.0pre - and others, see below

Hi, I've been using Firefox since the Phoenix/Firebird days and I've been running it on various platforms, in the last two years or so I've been running various versions on my good old Powerbook G4.

About two weeks ago Firefox began to refuse starting up. At first I thought it was a problem with one of my extensions or with the Beta version, however I can reproduce the same problem with the latest nightly (as of April 27, 2008), with 3.0 beta 5 and with 2.0.14, all without any extensions installed.

All these versions *do* start up after I remove "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Firefox" and create a new profile. However, after simply quitting (either with or without saving the window configuration), without doing anything else like visiting any web pages or installing any extensions, it won't start until I delete the profile again. Note that it simply doesn't start - there is no error message whatsoever. The icon in the task bar bounces once and that's it.

I also tried removing $HOME/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.*.plist to no avail.

I am fairly sure that this is not a problem with Firefox but with my system, however without any error message whatsoever I don't know where to start looking.

I tried running /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox from the console, hoping it would print something to stdout/stderr but that exits silently as well (with an error code of 1).

Running "firefox -safemode" also doesn't work.

Running "firefox -ProfileManager" and then clicking "Start Firefox" doesn't work either. However, if I run it that way, delete and re-create the default profile it will work. Just creating a new profile with a different name works as well.

I did find a log file at $HOME/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter/firefox-bin.crash.log, however the last entry is from 2007 so nothing seems to be logged there. I don't know where else to look for any diagnostic output.

At this point I have no idea how to get Firefox running on my system short of a complete OS reinstall or similarly drastic measures so any help is greatly appreciated. My main question is, are there any hidden log files or is there any way I can make Firefox more verbose?

As it doesn't seem to crash I don't think running it on top of gdb would help, but let me know if you'd like me to try that.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
(Note, I don't think this can be reproduced on a random system - it must have something to do with my environment)
1. Delete all profiles (rm -Rf "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Firefox") and start FF
2. Quit, with or without saving windows configuration
3. Doubleclick on Firefox icon or run it from the command line


Actual Results:  
Firefox doesn't start and there is no error dialog or console output

Expected Results:  
Firefox starting

Comment 1

[Julian Scheid]

I forgot to add that a few days ago I had problems with minor filesystem corruption, probably due to a forced shutdown. This is repaired now but it is entirely possible that somewhere there is a broken configuration file or something along those lines. However, apart from Firefox all my other applications (including Finder, Thunderbird, Adium, Skype, Terminal.app, Emacs etc.) work absolutely fine without any problems at all. 

Comment 2

[Julian Scheid]

Another thing I forgot to mention is that I did check for other Firefox instances running using ps(1) and that is not the problem.

I also just found the --debug switch, that gives me (with a profile in place and using 3.0b5 here):

$ /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox --debug
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/run-mozilla.sh -g /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
     LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/components:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
       SHLIB_PATH=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
          LIBPATH=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS:/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
       ADDON_PATH=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
      MOZ_PROGRAM=/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin
      MOZ_TOOLKIT=
        moz_debug=1
     moz_debugger=
/usr/bin/gdb /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -x /tmp/mozargs.CLfYSd
GNU gdb 6.3.50-20050815 (Apple version gdb-573) (Fri Oct 20 15:54:33 GMT 2006)
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "powerpc-apple-darwin"...Reading symbols for shared libraries ............ done

(gdb) run
Starting program: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin 
Reading symbols for shared libraries .................................................................................... done

Program exited with code 01.
(gdb) 

Comment 3

[Julian Scheid]

Ok I've downloaded the 3.0b5 source and made a debug build and I'm in the process of tracking this down. What I have so far is:

- nsXREDirProvider::SetProfile fails because the cache directory doesn't exit.
- $HOME/Library/Caches/Firefox does exist but $HOME/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles doesn't.

My guess so far is that $HOME/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles got deleted for some reason and won't be recreated when a new profile is created.

Comment 4

[Julian Scheid]

Ok found out what the problem is.

Due to the file system corruption I mentioned in an earlier comment, creation of $HOME/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles failed with an I/O error. This in turn leads to SetProfile failing.

I still think that this is a bug because in a normal build this error is never reported to the user. Even in a debug build it only leads to a warning being emitted.

Seeing that this prevents Firefox from starting up, I think that an error like this should be visible to the user. A dialog saying something like "Could not create $HOME/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles: I/O Error" would have been very helpful in figuring out what is going on here.

Comment 5

[Julian Scheid]

I guess this could be reproduced on any machine by clearing out and write protecting the local user directory ($HOME/Library/Caches/Firefox on the Mac).

Comment 6

[[:Aleksej]]

Maybe a different issue (the directory could be created), but:

firefox-27.0-build1.en-US.linux64

My profile is using ~/.cache (I don't know how Firefox chooses whether to use it).

I removed ~/.cache, and Firefox wouldn't start, showing a dialog about the profile being unaccessible (or something, with no details anyway), and in the terminal, "Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory."

I created the directories:
~/.cache — did not work;
~/.cache/mozilla — did not work;
~/.cache/mozilla/firefox — worked (created the cache directory for the profile, and the detailed directories inside).

I couldn't reproduce it with 2014-02-02-03-02-04-mozilla-central-firefox-29.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.  With the same build as that which I am using, I couldn't get Firefox to use ~/.cache (since I don't know how).

Comment 7

[[:Aleksej]]

Please ignore my previous comment, the problem was caused by mandatory access control.