530704 - Firefox doesn't start if ~/firefox directory exists

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Neil Skrypuch]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.3; Linux) KHTML/4.3.3 (like Gecko)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091122 Gentoo Firefox/3.5.5

If you have a ~/firefox directory (which
need not even contain anything), recent (3.5.2 works, 3.5.5 does not) versions of Firefox will not start.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
cd
mkdir firefox
firefox
Actual Results:  
Output of "Could not read application.ini" and Firefox fails to start.

Expected Results:  
Firefox starting correctly.

I had an old beta binary of firefox directly from the mozilla.org site sitting around in my home directory. After a recent update (through Portage from
www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.5.2 to www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.5.5) Firefox
decided that it didn't want to start anymore. Discovering the above issue was
very non-obvious.

This was originally reported here: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=294133

Comment 1

[Marien Zwart]

If I understand correctly this has to do with how Firefox is started on Gentoo. On gentoo currently (www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.5.5) /usr/bin/firefox is a symlink to /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox, which seems to be the xulrunner stub (the usual shell script is not used). I also assume (after reading the linked problem description) your bug report here is not entirely complete: the problem is not having that "firefox" directory in your homedir, it's having a "firefox" directory in the current directory you start firefox from.

The code involved is http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/annotate/cd24e78c2f2c/xulrunner/stub/nsXULStub.cpp#l271 which iiuc assumes that if argv[0] interpreted relative to the cwd exists that's the path we should use (this deals with things like ./firefox) and otherwise $PATH is searched for argv[0]. In your case argv[0] is just "firefox" and it exists in the current directory, so that's used as app dir, which breaks.

I suspect it working in the past was because gentoo's firefox install still used a wrapper script then, which either changed the working directory or (more likely) invoked firefox as /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox (you should see that if you launch firefox as /usr/bin/firefox or /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox instead of just "firefox" it will start). That is probably also why I cannot reproduce this under gdb: it passes the full path as argv[0].

Possible improvements include:

- Only accept executable files, not just anything that exists. That would have caught this case, but it's still not exactly reliable.

- Check if there are any "/"s in argv[0]. I think it makes sense to only look relative to the cwd if there is at least one "/" (skipping the PATH search) and only do the path search if there is no "/". But I have not entirely thought this through: it might break a legitimate case I'm overlooking.

Comment 2

[Neil Skrypuch]

That's right, running it as /usr/bin/firefox or /usr/lib64/mozilla-firefox/firefox works correctly. Also, yes, up until recently /usr/bin/firefox was a wrapper script instead of a symlink.

While not a separate case per se, it's worth noting that this also affects launching firefox via krunner (alt-f2) if you simply invoke firefox, which is where I originally stumbled upon this.

Comment 3

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Reporter, are you still seeing this issue with Firefox 3.6.13 or later in safe mode? If not, please close. These links can help you in your testing.
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+Mode
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles

You can also try to reproduce in Firefox 4 Beta 8 or later, there are many improvements in the new version, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Comment 4

[Neil Skrypuch]

Tested with 3.6.13, and the problem still occurs exactly as initially described.

Comment 5

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

No reply, INCOMPLETE. Please retest with Firefox 3.6.13 or later and a new profile (http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles). If you continue to see this issue with the newest firefox and a new profile, then please comment on this bug.

Comment 6

[Neil Skrypuch]

I replied, see comment #4.

Comment 7

[Jory A. Pratt [:anarchy]]

Please update this or close, I have tested with 35.0.1 on gentoo. I am unable to duplicate issue.

Comment 8

[Neil Skrypuch]

Looks like this was fixed at some point, I can't reproduce the issue anymore.