825456 - "ASSERTION: GetElementById had some kind of spasm" when clicking on ghostery icon in toolbar

Status: NEW

(Core :: XUL, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:
 0. Be using a debug build.
 1. Install Ghostery. Restart firefox to complete the install, and click "Skip wizard" on its firstrun page.
 2. Visit any site -- let's say "about:blank" for simplicity.
 3. Click ghostery icon in your browser toolbar.

ACTUAL RESULTS: When ghostery menu opens, this assertion-failure prints to your terminal:
###!!! ASSERTION: GetElementById had some kind of spasm.: 'Error', file /scratch/work/builds/mozilla-central/mozilla-central.12-12-07.08-13/mozilla/content/xul/content/src/nsXULPopupListener.cpp, line 380

I'm using Ghostery 2.8.3 with my own nightly debug build (on 64-bit ubuntu linux) from this morning, built from 9dc85c3d98ae.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: backtrace

Here's the backtrace of the assertion-failure.

At this point, the variable |identifier| is "ghostery-popup". (That's what we just passed to GetElementById(), and failed to find anything.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure this is an assertion-worthy situation...  (looks like this could happen if an extension has some broken XUL with a typo in an "id" tag or something)

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Yeah, there's a bunch of XUL crap that's asserts because it assumes XUL means our UI, whereas in practice extensions trigger them all the time.  :(