Disabled buttons and an "inactive" address bar

Thanks for your report.

Please can you try with a new profile following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs#head-fa398dbbff0621c74659f3a1303dfde9b46f221b and report here if it's still an issue or not.

I'm also experiencing this issue, created a new user and firefox works there. attempted firefox3 reinstall no change also removed all themes and extensions.

I found at that, if you'd run the firefox as root it works again. Then when I ran it normally, it worked again. Would like to know what could possibly cause an problem like this and how to prevent it.

Do you confirm that the problem went away with a new profile (or a new user with a default firefox profile) ?

Yes. Even after restarting, the problem was still there, until I ran it as a root user, then everything was good.

Confirmed that the problem went away with a new profile, also confirmed that the problem was solved when firefox was started using sudo. After running sudo firefox I closed firefox and opened the browser again using one of the icons in applications menu problem seems to have been fixed. Attempted logging in and out problem still fixed same result from a restart. Good job guys.

Thanks for the update.

Examining the information you have given us, this appears to be a problem with a corrupt profile. Regarding Mozilla Team policy, problems with corrupt profiles are not handled in bug reports. We are closing this bug report.

Thank you again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Feel free to submit any future bugs you may find.

Just for future refrence: Confirmed that the problem went away with a new profile in Ubuntu not within firefox. Running firefox as sudo seems to have fixed the issue as the error has not returned since.

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 07:30:07AM -0000, Itachi wrote:
> I found at that, if you'd run the firefox as root it works again. Then
> when I ran it normally, it worked again. Would like to know what could
> possibly cause an problem like this and how to prevent it.
>

Please never run firefox as root. That might exactly cause these kind
of issues for you.

 - Alexander

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 09:44:02AM -0000, Itachi wrote:
> Yes. Even after restarting, the problem was still there, until I ran it
> as a root user, then everything was good.
>

OK, we cannot support your bug. Instead we should fix the core issue:
running firefox as root creates garbage in pkglibdir which will break
profiles once firefox/xulrunner packages have received a considerable
upgrade.

 status triaged
 importance high
 retitle "firefox run as root should not break profiles when firefox got upgraded"

Maybe solution: we might consider to run update-chrome scripts in
postinst again.

 - Alexander

On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 02:50:25PM -0000, firesnow wrote:
> Just for future refrence: Confirmed that the problem went away with a
> new profile in Ubuntu not within firefox. Running firefox as sudo seems
> to have fixed the issue as the error has not returned since.
>

This will come back on each and every update for you now. Read the
other mail I just sent for more details. So dont run firefox as
root. It never was intended to be run as root.

 - Alexander

Sorry i was unlcear, running firefox as root once fixed the issue, basically opening the browser then closing it as root. Afterwards running firefox normally as a regular user the problem has not returned. Naturally and hopefully obviously running an application that interacts with the internet as root is a bad thing.

I agree that it was never intended to be run as root. However, note that I did not ran firefox as root that caused the problem to occur. I ran it as a normal user, and the problem occured. Once I ran it as root, it fixed the issue, and I can run it normally as a normal user. Yes, I did update firefox when this issue occured. So I agree that the problem occured when firefox was upgraded and may have corrupted the profiles. Did the problem get solved that the root fixed the profile or something? Or could it be that the problem could be solved when running firefox as another normal user?

On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 07:20:34AM -0000, Itachi wrote:
> I agree that it was never intended to be run as root. However, note that
> I did not ran firefox as root that caused the problem to occur. I ran it
> as a normal user, and the problem occured. Once I ran it as root, it
> fixed the issue, and I can run it normally as a normal user. Yes, I did
> update firefox when this issue occured. So I agree that the problem
> occured when firefox was upgraded and may have corrupted the profiles.
> Did the problem get solved that the root fixed the profile or something?
> Or could it be that the problem could be solved when running firefox as
> another normal user?
>

We have a patch in the RC1 package to be released any day, that should
make corruptions at least go partly away. However, fixing the upgrade
thing is a long term goal of firefox as it requires substantial
rework. Firefox 3.x wont have that, lets hope for ffox 4.

 - Alexander

That sounds terrific!

This problem happened to 3 of my users since I migrated to Hardy (5 weeks ago). Twice for one of them.
Each time, I had to backup the bookmarks.html, delete the profile, create a new one and import the bookmarks.
Users lost their homepage and history.

I understand that FF team does not support corrupted profiles, but these corruptions are not the users fault. They did nothing new from what they used to do with Gutsy. And this never happened with FF2. Clearly, the problem comes from FF3.

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 04:37:21PM -0000, batosai wrote:
> This problem happened to 3 of my users since I migrated to Hardy (5 weeks ago). Twice for one of them.
> Each time, I had to backup the bookmarks.html, delete the profile, create a new one and import the bookmarks.
> Users lost their homepage and history.
>
> I understand that FF team does not support corrupted profiles, but these
> corruptions are not the users fault. They did nothing new from what they
> used to do with Gutsy. And this never happened with FF2. Clearly, the
> problem comes from FF3.
>

We would certainly deal with profile corruption if we could reproduce
any of them. However, these kind of bugs tend to be particular
difficult to reproduce and thus hard to track down/triage.

Suggestions on how to better deal with them welcome.

 - Alexander

I'm having this exact same issue, however the workarounds provided here are not fixing the issue for me.
The errors I'm getting in the console are similar to the ones reported here:

Failed to load XPCOM component: /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9/components/pyabout.py

Failed to load XPCOM component: /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9/components/libpyloader.so

Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE) [nsIJSCID.getService]" nsresult: "0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: file:///usr/lib/firefox-3.0/components/nsBrowserGlue.js :: bg__initPlaces :: line 386" data: no]
Source File: file:///usr/lib/firefox-3.0/components/nsBrowserGlue.js
Line: 386

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE) [nsIJSCID.getService]" nsresult: "0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://browser/content/search/search.xml :: get_searchService :: line 145" data: no]

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE) [nsIJSCID.getService]" nsresult: "0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://browser/content/search/search.xml :: initialize :: line 527" data: no]

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8007000e (NS_ERROR_OUT_OF_MEMORY) [nsIDocShellHistory.useGlobalHistory]" nsresult: "0x8007000e (NS_ERROR_OUT_OF_MEMORY)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://browser/content/browser.js :: prepareForStartup :: line 740" data: no]

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE) [nsIJSCID.getService]" nsresult: "0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: file:///usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9/modules/utils.js :: anonymous :: line 105" data: no]

Oddly enough, Firefox runs fine for root. I've created new profiles, deleted old profiles, deleted my .mozilla directory, ran firefox as root, all to no avail.

I seem to have found a workaround for my problem. My /home directory is NFS mounted, and creating the profile in a local disk seems to have fixed the issue.

I'm not really sure why would Firefox bug all of the sudden since it was working last week, there's plenty of space in home and permissions don't seem to be an issue.

Hey, mine are NFS-mounted too ! Maybe we have a common point here...
Unfortunately, my users are mobile and I can't store FF profile on a local disk.

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 05:05:16PM -0000, Alvaro Toledo wrote:
> I seem to have found a workaround for my problem. My /home directory is
> NFS mounted, and creating the profile in a local disk seems to have
> fixed the issue.
>

firefox relies on file timtamps to determine when an update requires
recreation of various cache files. So a bad time on server might cause
files not being recreated. Just guessing ...

 - Alexander

I dug to the bottom of my issue, and it turned out to be a hosed lockd on the NFS server. I imagine that firefox didn't deal well too well with not being able to lock the profile.

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 09:24:45PM -0000, Alvaro Toledo wrote:
> I dug to the bottom of my issue, and it turned out to be a hosed lockd
> on the NFS server. I imagine that firefox didn't deal well too well with
> not being able to lock the profile.
>

anyone else sees this without NFS?

 status incomplete

 - Alexander

The NFS server was about 10 minutes in the future here. Installed ntpd to avoid this. Maybe this will solve the problem...

On the other hand, maybe the recent release of FF3 (no beta) will too.

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 05:06:10PM -0000, batosai wrote:
> The NFS server was about 10 minutes in the future here. Installed ntpd
> to avoid this. Maybe this will solve the problem...
>
> On the other hand, maybe the recent release of FF3 (no beta) will too.
>

beta is just a name ... get over it :)

 - Alexander

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 05:06:10PM -0000, batosai wrote:
> The NFS server was about 10 minutes in the future here. Installed ntpd
> to avoid this. Maybe this will solve the problem...
>
> On the other hand, maybe the recent release of FF3 (no beta) will too.
>

thanks

 status invalid

due to timescrew of home folder

 - Alexander

Hello,
The problem happens when you use Firefox as a root user. This has happened to me twice. You can fix the problem by creating a new profile using the Profile Manager of Firefox. However you will loose extensions and bookmarks and all your settings. Instead I found a simpler way - the problem apparently is that the file "places.sqlite-journal" in your 'corupted' profile folder gets literally owned by root. That is the file owner is now root - so to solve this problem just run -

sudo chown <your_username> /home/<your_username>/.mozilla/firefox/<profilename>/places.sqlite-journal

That solved my problem - I am sure that that is the only file that gets affected by running Firefox 3 as root.

On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 03:45:27AM -0000, Rohit Arondekar wrote:
> Hello,
> The problem happens when you use Firefox as a root user. This has happened to me twice. You can fix the problem by creating a new profile using the Profile Manager of Firefox. However you will loose extensions and bookmarks and all your settings. Instead I found a simpler way - the problem apparently is that the file "places.sqlite-journal" in your 'corupted' profile folder gets literally owned by root. That is the file owner is now root - so to solve this problem just run -
>
> sudo chown <your_username>
> /home/<your_username>/.mozilla/firefox/<profilename>/places.sqlite-
> journal
>
> That solved my problem - I am sure that that is the only file that gets
> affected by running Firefox 3 as root.
>

firefox probably also changes files in the system hierarchy
(e.g. /usr/lib/firefox-3.0) ... could you test and report which files
are affected there as well?

 - Alexander

Hey, I just confirm that, for me, the problem is solved using :
sudo chown <your_username> /home/<your_username>/.mozilla/firefox/<profilename>/places.sqlite-journal
thanks

In my case, I fixed this by deleting /all/ my sqlite files (find -name "*sql*" -delete from the profile directory). Interestingly, this resulted in no noticeable changes to my profile, possibly because it is mostly migrated from Firefox 2.

Warning. Backup your profile folder first before trying this.

I have seen the same problem and I too have /home over NFS. It seems that for some reason or another some locks remain in place. Opening places.sqlite by hand also gave an arror (forgot to write it down, sorry).

After creating a tarball from the profile directory from ~/.mozilla/firefox, removing the original directory and unpacking the tarball everything works again as expected.