581840 - Window display intermittently fails

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[David Jackson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:2.0b1) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/4.0b1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:2.0b1) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/4.0b1

Starting with late Minefield 4.0b2pre nightlies, I have seen an intermittent failure to display ANY web content windows.  The menus display fine and open windows show up in the Window menu, but no windows are actually visible and no amount of trying different URLs, reloading existing sites or even closing and opening Minefield will reinstate the showing of windows.  The only solution seems to be closing Minefield, opening Firefox 4.0 beta 1, closing firefox and then reopening Minefield.  Minefield then behaves normally for a long period of time until the next incident.  Minefield is my default browser and the problem seems to happen about once a day.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Browse using Minefield
2. Closing all windows may be part of the problem; it is so intermittent that I really haven't been able to pinpoint a sequence of events
3. "About Minefield" window will open and display, but all normal web windows fail to display.
Actual Results:  
Intermittently, ALL web windows will fail to display.

Expected Results:  
Web windows are visible

Comment 1

[David Jackson]

Sorry it is so undefined and intermittent.  I know these are the hardest to track down.

Comment 2

[David Jackson]

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US;
> rv:2.0b1) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/4.0b1
> Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US;
> rv:2.0b1) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/4.0b1
> 
> Starting with late Minefield 4.0b2pre nightlies, I have seen an intermittent
> failure to display ANY web content windows.  The menus display fine and open
> windows show up in the Window menu, but no windows are actually visible and no
> amount of trying different URLs, reloading existing sites or even closing and
> opening Minefield will reinstate the showing of windows.  The only solution
> seems to be closing Minefield, opening Firefox 4.0 beta 1, closing firefox and
> then reopening Minefield.  Minefield then behaves normally for a long period of
> time until the next incident.  Minefield is my default browser and the problem
> seems to happen about once a day.  
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Browse using Minefield
> 2. Closing all windows may be part of the problem; it is so intermittent that I
> really haven't been able to pinpoint a sequence of events
> 3. "About Minefield" window will open and display, but all normal web windows
> fail to display.
> Actual Results:  
> Intermittently, ALL web windows will fail to display.
> 
> Expected Results:  
> Web windows are visible

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US;
> rv:2.0b1) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/4.0b1
> Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US;
> rv:2.0b1) Gecko/20100630 Firefox/4.0b1
> 
> Starting with late Minefield 4.0b2pre nightlies, I have seen an intermittent
> failure to display ANY web content windows.  The menus display fine and open
> windows show up in the Window menu, but no windows are actually visible and no
> amount of trying different URLs, reloading existing sites or even closing and
> opening Minefield will reinstate the showing of windows.  The only solution
> seems to be closing Minefield, opening Firefox 4.0 beta 1, closing firefox and
> then reopening Minefield.  Minefield then behaves normally for a long period of
> time until the next incident.  Minefield is my default browser and the problem
> seems to happen about once a day.  
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Browse using Minefield
> 2. Closing all windows may be part of the problem; it is so intermittent that I
> really haven't been able to pinpoint a sequence of events
> 3. "About Minefield" window will open and display, but all normal web windows
> fail to display.
> Actual Results:  
> Intermittently, ALL web windows will fail to display.
> 
> Expected Results:  
> Web windows are visible

Current Build showing display failure is: 
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b3pre) Gecko/20100725 Minefield/4.0b3pre ID:20100725030726, NOT the 4.0b1 build shown in the first report

Comment 3

[David Jackson]

Noticed that ability to bookmark place or group of places fails as well.  I assume this is a precursor to the eventual failure to display windows, since it is the "bookmark manager" window that is failing to display in this case.

Comment 4

[David Jackson]

Initial report incorrectly specifies reproducibility data field - the window display fails intermittently (once a day), NOT always.  Nothing has changed, I just failed to see the "reproducibility" field.

Comment 5

[David Jackson]

(In reply to comment #0)
> The only solution seems to be closing Minefield, opening Firefox 4.0 beta 1, 
> closing firefox and then reopening Minefield.  Minefield then behaves normally 
> for a long period of time until the next incident.  Minefield is my default 
> browser and the problem seems to happen about once a day.  
> 
Just to be clear, closing and reopening Minefield does NOT fix the problem.  Opening Firefox beta 1 and then reopening Minefield 4.0b3 DOES fix the problem.  Some kind of resetting of some beta 1 setting in the Profile files may be happening to fix the 4.0b3 problem.  

Also, one window can still be visualized even when all other Minefield windows fail to display: the "About Minefield" window can still be brought up.

Comment 6

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

I experienced this on: 
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b3pre) Gecko/20100728 Minefield/4.0b3pre

Starting in safe-mode displays the windows but after returning to regular mode Minefield still didn't load the windows.

Also reported on Hendrix (mozilla.feedback.firefox.prerelease) for beta 2:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.feedback.firefox.prerelease/browse_thread/thread/479fb6b13d1219ec

Comment 7

[David Jackson]

Thanks for the clue about beta 2, MattN.

I also had been using the released 4.0b1 as my "safe" browser.  I had updated to 4.0b2 when it was released and thought it also was "safe" from display failure - however, I no longer think b2 is free of the diplay issue.  

I ran through ~20 minutes of test browsing with the latest Minefield 4.0b3 this evening and (as has become usual) I began to see a series of problems crop up.  

I noticed the problems in this order: 
1. Early in the browsing session I noticed that individual bookmarks and bookmark folders which appear in my bookmark list when viewed in Firefox 3.6.8,  DO NOT appear when viewed in 4.0b3.  
2. Late in the session, I noticed that the search bar seemed dead: typing in the search text box and pressing enter brought NO response.
3. Finally, I closed all open windows, and when I reopened Minefield, the display problem was fully in force - NO windows showed on the desktop, although the Minefield "Window" menu showed my home page in the list of open windows.  

This is the usual problematic behavior, but it led me to confirm that the same problem exists in the 4.0b2 released version (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b2) Gecko/20100720 Firefox/4.0b2 ID:20100720175703).  After closing the Minefield 4.0b3 that was windowless, I reopened the released 4.0b2 and it also failed to display any windows.   Hendrix was right about b2 - it is also afflicted.

Comment 8

[David Jackson]

(In reply to comment #7)
> 
> I noticed the problems in this order: 
> 1. Early in the browsing session I noticed that individual bookmarks and
> bookmark folders which appear in my bookmark list when viewed in Firefox 3.6.8,
>  DO NOT appear when viewed in 4.0b3.  
> 2. Late in the session, I noticed that the search bar seemed dead: typing in
> the search text box and pressing enter brought NO response.
> 3. Finally, I closed all open windows, and when I reopened Minefield, the
> display problem was fully in force - NO windows showed on the desktop, although
> the Minefield "Window" menu showed my home page in the list of open windows.  
> 

One more precursor problem to the final window display failure: sometime between the occurance of item 1 & 2 (quoted above), the ability to save images from web pages failed.  I would do a "save as" on various image files, the save dialog would behave as usual, but then nothing would actually get saved.

Comment 9

[David Jackson]

Just to bring this full circle - the window failure described in this bug has not happened in more than a month of nightlies.