505029 - Firefox 3.5.1 has compatible problem with gmail

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jay Xu]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; zh-CN; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1 AutoPager/0.5.2.2 (http://www.teesoft.info/)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; zh-CN; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1 AutoPager/0.5.2.2 (http://www.teesoft.info/)

1. Cannot compose a email
2. Cannot forward or reply to a mail

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.1. Open mailbox in gmail
1.2. Click "Compose Mail"

2.1. Open a mail in mailbox in gmail
2.2. Click "Reply" or "Forward"

Actual Results:  
1. Nothing happened
2. The page stopped with "Loading rich text..."

Expected Results:  
1. Can compose a mail in dialog
2. Can forward or reply to a mail in dialog

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

works for me - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1

Please check if Firefox's safe mode or a new profile change the behavior you are seeing. Both are explained in http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic+troubleshooting

Comment 2

[Jay Xu]

(In reply to comment #1)
> works for me - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1)
> Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1
> 
> Please check if Firefox's safe mode or a new profile change the behavior you
> are seeing. Both are explained in
> http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic+troubleshooting

It works in my Windows, but not in Mac, even in a new FF profile.

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is on the 3.5 branch, so please leave it.
You made no changes to the new profile, correct?

Comment 4

[Jay Xu]

(In reply to comment #3)
> This is on the 3.5 branch, so please leave it.
> You made no changes to the new profile, correct?

correct

Comment 5

[Jay Xu]

Does someone else encounter this bug? Now I have to use Safari to open gmail...

Comment 9

[Jo Hermans]

I noticed it too - since Monday I got intermittent problems when trying to connect to gmail. I traced with Wireshark, which told me that my SSL connection was reset by the Google server. Since I have been testing with a lot of different certificates lately (both for Mozilla tests and in my daytime job), I decided to reset my certificate database back to the default, and remove all my Google cookies. That fixed my problems. Note that I never store any permanent exception, but Firefox will cache various intermediate certificates that it can find in the certificate chain.

Today, a colleague complained that he couldn't access iGoogle anymore, but he wasn't using Gmail. I saw that he had collected a mass of certificates over the last year. On a hunch I tried the same solution : I also deleted his certificate database, although I didn't touch his cookies. That fixed his problems too.

It seems that some people have a certificate cached in their local database, which is refused by the Google server (or by some Google servers).

Reporters: can you please test the following :
- close Firefox
- go the your profile directory (<http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles#How_to_find_your_profile>)
- move the cert8.db file to your desktop (so that can restore it later)
- start Firefox
- the cert8.db files is automatically recreated form the set built in Firefox
- report here if Gmail or iGoogle works again

This should not cause problems for most people, unless you have installed a special certificate in your local copy if Firefox on which you depend, but that's rare (I have one for a smartcard reader). You might now see a few websites that don't work anymore, unless you install the certificate as an exception (they're stored in the cert8.db files). The same dialog as you saw before. Except for the reappareance of that dialog, the delete of the file is completely safe. You can also restore the bad copy which you just saved on your desktop, although it would still contain the bad certificate that caused this problem.

Comment 10

[henry.godfrey]

Attachment: Corrupted cert8.db

Followed advice, closed Firefox, removed cert8.db from %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles\, restarted Firefox. 

Firefox now loads quickly and rapidly accesses gmail.

Comment 11

[henry.godfrey]

Thanks for your help.

Comment 12

[Jay Xu]

I deleted cert8.db, cleared all the cookies but unfortunately, still not work

Comment 13

[Tal Pe'er]

I deleted cert8.db, still have problems with Gmail.
In general, I've encountered many problems since installing version 3.5.2, this is only one of them. I'm starting to think about other browsers until FF is fixed.

Comment 14

[Tal Pe'er]

One more addition - I have same problems of slowness and sometimes stuck - when using Google Reader

Comment 15

[Jay Xu]

Good news: now my Safari doesn't work in gmail either. Maybe it's google's issue?

Comment 16

[Jay Xu]

Seems fixed in 3.5.3, also for Safari.  Maybe Google fixed something?

Comment 17

[Jo Hermans]

I have seen the problem come and go for the last month and a half. The last time was on Monday (using Firefox 3.5.2, 3.5.3pre, 3.6a2pre and 3.7), I'm waiting a bit before saying that it's fixed. Note that we haven't received any new reports since August.

I only experienced the problem when using the proxyserver of my company. I could temporarily fix the problem by removing cert8.db, but not always. Further investigation showed that I didn't see the problem at home (without a proxy), or by switching to a backup proxy (unused by my colleagues). So I think that the proxyserver was caching some kind of bad data (CRL, OCSP ?), possibly loaded by an older version of Firefox, or maybe some Google server was delivering a different version than the others. That might explain why removing cert8.db didn't always work, if you accidentally loaded the same data from the cache again.

Comment 18

[Mathieu Marquer]

I'm currently encountering this issue with FF 4.0preb8 (17 November nightly), both Linux and Windows.

Comment 19

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

seems to be fixed