986822 - Customize Toolbar items appear and then disappear when Firefox starts.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Samir]

Attachment: 2014-03-22-122215.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140314220517

Steps to reproduce:

Double click on the Firefox shortcut on the Windows Desktop.


Actual results:

1. A new Firefox process starts (as seen in Task Manager).
2. The Firefox program window appears in maximized mode.
3. All the toolbar items that are available from the Customize Toolbar dialog box appear on the Navigation Toolbar in the upper right corner of the program window.
4. These items disappear one or two seconds into the loading time.
5. Two seconds later Firefox is fully loaded and these items disappear.

I don't use any of these items. But they appear anyway. I installed Firefox on March 18 on a cleanly installed version of Windows 7. I haven't made any major changes to Firefox, I mostly use default settings. I only have 13 and 7 plugins extensions installed.


Expected results:

Unless custom toolbar items are actually configured to be used on the Navigation Toolbar, they should not appear at all when Firefox starts, not even for a second.

Comment 1

[Samir]

Attachment: 2014-03-22-144730.png

In this screenshot Firefox is fully loaded, and the toolbar items have disappeared.

Comment 2

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

It's likely one of your extensions is causing this so you can try and disable them to see which one it is. This will hopefully be fixed in Firefox 29 (now on beta).

Comment 3

[Samir]

Before I posted this bug report I have of course tested to see what happens when I disable all my extensions. When I do that, the problem goes away. I have then tested to see what happens when I enable my extensions again, enabling them one by one, closing and then starting Firefox each time.

It seems to me that there is a certain threshold of how many extensions I have enabled and when the problem starts to manifest. I have tested this again right now, and with about 4 extensions enabled it's not a problem. But when I enable the 5th extension the problem starts to manifest again. When I disable one or two extensions it goes away again.

So this is not related to any specific extension. I could disable or enable any extension and the problem would manifest or go away. It's all about how many extensions Firefox has to load, and how big those extensions are. So it seems that loading many and relatively large extensions cause this problem.

I have even tested running a clean install of Firefox inside a VM in VirtualBox. I got the same behavior there. As it's only a VM the threshold at which it starts to act up is when 3 extensions are loaded. If I disable one or two of them to load off Firefox, the problem goes away.

The computer runs on Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.2 GHz, with Corsair 4 GB DDR2 at 800 MHz and Windows 7 64-bit. It should be able to handle more than just about 5 extensions. I know it can handle it. I have been able to load up to 120 tabs in one program window without any problems.

I should point out that this was not a problem in Firefox 27.x. It was introduced when I updated to the latest Firefox 28.0 stable release.

Comment 4

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

If you want to give Firefox 29 Beta a try, it would be helpful to know if the problem is fixed there. The customization code is greatly improved in that version.

https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/beta/