firefox displays extension page on start

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Binary package hint: firefox

Hello! I recently updated to Lucid, and I noticed Firefox doesn't start up as usual anymore.

The first thing that appears after running FF is the “add-ons window”, the one that usually appears when FF notices updates available for some extensions. However, there are no updates displayed in that window. If I click “skip” the window goes away and the usual FF window appears. No idea what's going on.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Mar 4 17:04:24 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
FirefoxPackages:
 firefox 3.6+nobinonly-0ubuntu5
 firefox-gnome-support N/A
 firefox-branding 3.6+nobinonly-0ubuntu5
 abroswer N/A
 abrowser-branding N/A
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: firefox 3.6+nobinonly-0ubuntu5
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-15.22-generic
SourcePackage: firefox
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-15-generic x86_64

[Draycen DeCator (ddecator)]

Thank you for reporting this to Ubuntu. Sometimes Firefox profiles can become corrupt and/or extensions can conflict. Could you please try this with a new profile and see if the problem still exists? You do not need to delete your old profile to test. If this helps, you might want to try to disable all your extensions and re-enable them one by one until you find the problematic one.

You can start the profile manager with the following command:
firefox -ProfileManager

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

Hello Draycen,

It seems it's more borked than I thought. I did a bit more experimenting:

First of all, a new profile does make the dialog go away, so presumably it's something in my profile that it doesn't like. That said, I have a lot invested in that profile (add-on settings, history), so I wouldn't want to lose it. Anyway, it would be nice to see what caused it, especially since I didn't modify anything in my profile since the update to Lucid (thus it may hit others).

What else I observed:
1) With my borked (default) profile, the add-ons window is always blank. That is, not only the ones displayed spuriously at start-up, but also those that I try to open via the menu. So I can't turn extensions off one by one (except by messing with the profile folder).
2) Even so, my extensions seem to work.
3) While starting FF from the command line I noticed it complained about the QuakeLive extension. QL comes with both a 32bit and a 64bit library, and FF was complaining about the 32bit one. I deleted the extension by removing its folder in my profile. On the next start-up FF noticed this and said it removed it, and I got no more chatter about it. But still my problem persists.

Is there any way of disabling (non-destructively) an extension by hand (not going through the menu)?

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

Oh, and I forgot the most important thing:

4) I tried running it as “firefox -safe-mode”. I _still_ got the empty add-ons window, and _then_ the safe mode dialog (where it asks you if you want to disable something permanently). Even so, the manually-opened add-ons window was still empty.

This is bad, I assume, because it indicates there's something going wrong _before_ activating the add-ons. Any ideas?

[Draycen DeCator (ddecator)]

Thank you for the extra information. Could you please let us know if you have ubufox installed? If not, can you please install it and see if that resolves any of the issues you are experiencing?

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

First of all, yes, I did have ubufox installed.

But note that the last few days I don’t remember seeing the add-ons window starting up automatically when I run Firefox. I had removed some add-ons manually by deleting their folders in my profile, it’s probably related to that. However, when I open the add-ons window by hand, it was still empty.

After your suggestion I tried purging Ubufox. The add-ons window is still blank, but it didn’t appear automatically at startup.

Then I tried reinstalling Ubufox. The add-ons window appeared automatically the first time I started FF, as it normally does after a new add-on is installed. But it was still empty.

Note that _all_ tabs in the add-ons window are empty: Get Add-ons, Extensions, Themes, Languages, Plugins and Updates. (Though I have several of each, and they seem to work.)

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

Another thing — no idea if it’s relevant: After removing/installing Ubufox the setup of my menu bars was reset. I normally move the address bar and a few buttons from the navigation bar to the menu bar, and hide the latter, to have a thinner “header” above the pages. After the “experiment” I was left with the navigation bar hidden, but with all the things I had put in the menu bar removed other than the menus.

[Draycen DeCator (ddecator)]

Sorry your menu bar got reset. Could you please let us know if there are items in the add-ons window when you are using a new profile? You mentioned that it is blank when in safe-mode and on your default profile, but you never said whether it was filled when using a new profile. Once we know for sure if this is a profile issue or a problem with Firefox, we'll have a better idea of how to approach this bug. Thanks in advance!

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

Hi Draycen! The menu bar was no big deal to set back. There’s something a bit strange about that: after doing the Ubufox juggling I ended up with Ubufox installed, and the menu bar seemed to reset itself after every FF restart. (I just uninstalled it and it stopped happening.) But I had Ubufox installed before and that didn’t happen. Perhaps it was just a transient thing, I didn’t care enough about Ubufox to experiment more.

Running with an new profile does show things in the window. The “Get Add-ons” tab has a selection of Recommended extensions, there’s the default theme and language in their tab, all the plugins I have installed system-wide. The only blank one is “Extensions”, as I don’t have any of those installed system-wide.

In contrast, starting FF with my profile (even in safe-mode) has everything empty.

[Draycen DeCator (ddecator)]

Thank you for testing that, it gives us a better idea of what to try next. Could you please open Firefox, go to the Error Console (Tools > Error Console), clear out everything currently in there, then open up the Extensions window on your default profile? If the Extensions window has started appearing at start-up again, then please close and start Firefox again to see if you receive any extra error messages. After that, please let us know about any errors that showed up so we can hopefully pinpoint the issue.

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

OK, so opening the add-ons window, the only thing that appears is this:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER) [nsIRDFService.GetLiteral]" nsresult: "0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://mozapps/content/extensions/extensions.js :: rebuildLWThemeDS :: line 890" data: no]

I tried it several times and the same message appeared.

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

I’m happy to report that this seems to have fixed itself.

Today (or yesterday, not sure) FF was upgraded to 3.6.2. After the upgrade it asked me to restart FF, and I noticed on the restart the “checking add-on compatibility” dialog running. Later I saw that the Add-ons menu worked. I don’t know if the after-upgrade checks have fixed something or if they simply disabled a newly-incompatible add-on that just happened to have caused the bug.