Firefox 3 Beta 4 display problems

[Screaming Monkey]

Starting Firefox in Ubuntu Hardy heron Beta and logging into my gmail account, I can no longer view the labels beside the e-mails. Also when visiting the Ubuntu bug reporting page other text is completely missing. I am including two screenshots. I thought it might be my add-ons (answers or web developer) but after disabling both of them it did not solve the problem. Thinking it might be font rendering or something like that, I changed the size and font in my preferences dialog and that didn't help either.

[Screaming Monkey (lyfs)]

Screenshot 2

[Screaming Monkey (lyfs)]

Checked things in epiphany as well and the same thing happens there. So, this isn't simply a firefox issue.

[Screaming Monkey (lyfs)]

So, I uninstalled firefox 3 beta 4 and installed firefox 2 and didn't have the same problem, however it crashed on me repeatedly, no matter what site I went to it always crashed within minutes of opening.

[Screaming Monkey (lyfs)]

Experimented with a possible solution, only now I can't determine exactly which one it is. I had installed a bunch of new fonts manually and that's when the problem occurred. So I deleted the fonts that I installed and cleared the cache and now there's no problem. However, I don't know which font it might be. Hmmmm....have to do a bit of testing - which sucks because there's about 1,000 fonts to go through.

[Screaming Monkey (lyfs)]

After a bit of trial and error, I found the problem font to be the Tahoma font. Eliminated that and added the rest of mine and no more disappearing words in Firefox 3 beta 4.

[arno_b (arno.b)]

Please try with a clean profile using firefox -safe-mode.
Does it still happen with beta 5?

[HughOSB (hughosb)]

After upgrading Firefox from beta 5 to rc1, and downloading the other updates and dependencies, ther is now no longer any text displayed in Firefox, only images. The same occurs in OpenOffice.org, both 2.4 and 3 Beta. I have attached screenshots. Reading the above I removed Tahoma font but that has no effect at all. I did intall some fonts earlier today but these did not affect anything before this upgrade. Abiword and Opera both work.

I have uninstalled and re-installed FF3 rc1 - same bug occurs. I have reinstalled beta 5 - the same bug. And installing FF2 has no effect as it never loads when launched!

I really miss Firefox and would love to get it working!

[HughOSB (hughosb)]

The OpenOffce.org 3 Beta screenshot.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 09:21:14PM -0000, HughOSB wrote:
> After upgrading Firefox from beta 5 to rc1, and downloading the other
> updates and dependencies, ther is now no longer any text displayed in
> Firefox, only images. The same occurs in OpenOffice.org, both 2.4 and 3
> Beta. I have attached screenshots. Reading the above I removed Tahoma
> font but that has no effect at all. I did intall some fonts earlier
> today but these did not affect anything before this upgrade. Abiword and
> Opera both work.
>
> I have uninstalled and re-installed FF3 rc1 - same bug occurs. I have
> reinstalled beta 5 - the same bug. And installing FF2 has no effect as
> it never loads when launched!
>
> I really miss Firefox and would love to get it working!

Are you sure that you upgraded your system completely? Maybe you
aborted some upgrade at some point?

 - Alexander

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

 status incomplete

 - Alexander

[HughOSB (hughosb)]

I do not think so - I let synaptic run till it said it was finished, and let it install everything that was with it to be updated. Certainly I did not abort it and it did not say it had aborted. :-/

[HughOSB (hughosb)]

Somehow, and I am am not sure exactly how, I have managed to get a working FF3 by installing rc2 from the Mozilla site. Then I reinstalled OpenOffice and got it working, though with a display bug in the template interface. Alas I am still no wiser as to what happened!

[HughOSB (hughosb)]

I spoke too soon. After trying to install the Helix/Real plugin to FF3 rc2 it has reverted again to the textless display. After uninstalling, purging, reinstalling etc I have the same problem. Curiously, if I type "sudo firefox" in Terminal I get a version of Firefox, minus all my configuration, but with text appearing!

Can someome tell me what is happening?!

Desperate.....

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Sun, Jun 08, 2008 at 07:28:13PM -0000, HughOSB wrote:
> I spoke too soon. After trying to install the Helix/Real plugin to FF3
> rc2 it has reverted again to the textless display. After uninstalling,
> purging, reinstalling etc I have the same problem. Curiously, if I type
> "sudo firefox" in Terminal I get a version of Firefox, minus all my
> configuration, but with text appearing!
>

Please dont run as root. that will clutter your install and will make
it harder to get back to a cured state.

> Can someome tell me what is happening?!
>

we cannot support you if you install things from mozilla.com ... stick
to packages and never run with sudo or root and we can support you.

 - Alexander

[HughOSB (hughosb)]

Sorry - I am very much the Linux/Ubuntu newbie. In desperation I installed SeaMonkey with synaptic and it too has the same problem. I also installed Flock, and it is working perfectly and even allows me to use the same add-ons as FF. So I am just going to give up on FF and use Flock.

Thanks.

[Patricio Gonzalez (pagondel)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.