982324 - Breakdown: Find a way to avoid the »Firefox is already running in another process« error

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #951644 +++

We might not be able to solve the underlying issue quickly, but maybe there are some things we can do to avoid the problem.

We could for example instead of throwing the error, show a progress indicator and wait for the old Firefox instance to shut down. Possibly also include a button to force quit the old instance after a while.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Neil: I was thinking that we probably start by filing a bug about telemetry for detecting how often these situations occur in practice, and which particular variants of it are most common.

Comment 2

[Neil Deakin]

> Neil: I was thinking that we probably start by filing a bug about telemetry
> for detecting how often these situations occur in practice, and which
> particular variants of it are most common.

That already exists and was implemented by bug 815418.

Comment 3

[Neil Deakin]

> We could for example instead of throwing the error, show a progress
> indicator and wait for the old Firefox instance to shut down.

Currently, we wait 5 seconds then show the dialog.

> Possibly also include a button to force quit the old instance after a while.

The dialog already supports such a button, but is always hidden since there's no underlying implementation to do the force quit. On Windows, this is bug 286355.

Comment 4

[u279076]

Ioana, please make sure this gets assigned for sign-off in this iteration.

Comment 5

[u279076]

Marco reached out to me and informed me that this bug just tracks the work breakdown so I'm marking this as [qa-].

Comment 6

[Neil Deakin]

I added two bugs:

- 985921 - improve the UI of the dialog
- 985926 - improve the telemetry for this dialog

There is also bug 286355 about a force quit button on Windows. If bug 985921 decides that such a button is desirable, we should also file similar bugs for other platforms.

Comment 7

[Neil Deakin]

Any additional bugs would be dependent on what UI would be used here.

Comment 8

[Benjamin Smedberg]

The measurement landed in bug 815418 but do we need a separate work item to actually publish/interpret the results?

I'm worried that we still don't have enough detail about why this dialog is appearing, or whether things like bug 921046 improved the situation on windows. We have a couple different cases and OSes to worry about:

* An actual running instance (usually with multiple profiles and -no-remote)
* A prior instance that is shutting down slowly
* Double launch where one "wins" (this should only be a problem on linux, and is covered by bug 921063.

Comment 9

[Neil Deakin]

The intent is for bug 985926 to add more telemetry that could provide more detail about why the dialog is appearing. My understanding is that the work done in bug 815418 only indicates that the dialog appeared and provides no additional detail.

Comment 10

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Oh great, I missed the details in bug 985926.