Firefox Misbehaves in all sorts of ways when upgraded while running

[Paul Sladen]

Firefox is a webbrowser. Version '1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-1ubuntu10' can get itself into a mode where the drop-down menus are empty and appear only as a small zero-height box:

  http://www.paul.sladen.org/ubuntu/bugs/firefox-empty-menu.png

The small black dot is the border of the empty menu.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

This appears to be the result of upgrading Firefox underneath itself, as all of the rest of the Chrome dies too.

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

Paul Sladen writes ("[Bug 36739] ff displays menus as 4x2 pixel empty box."):
> Firefox is a webbrowser. Version '1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-1ubuntu10' can get
> itself into a mode where the drop-down menus are empty and appear only
> as a small zero-height box:
>
> http://www.paul.sladen.org/ubuntu/bugs/firefox-empty-menu.png
>
> The small black dot is the border of the empty menu.

Did you fail to restart your firefox after an upgrade ?

Ian.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

I just carried on using it (which worked for about 48hours :-).

Firefox didn't ask me to restart and I can't remember whether the Notification Manager did either.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Ian, given how common these problems are, we would save ourselves a lot of trouble by notifying the user to restart firefox. (the message printed by postinst doesn't count; users are unlikely to see it) The notification is trivial to implement via update-notifier (mvo can provide details about the interface), though it will need to be wrapped in a test for whether firefox is currently running.

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

Having played with it once, I wonder what the best approach is to make
these notifications translatable. The easy way of adding a notification
is crating a file in /var/lib/update-notifier/user.d from the postinst.
However, that is not really translatable...

(example patch attached)

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

Install a simple notification from the postinst script.

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

I have set it up to use update-notifier in 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.2-0ubuntu2. That's what we'll do in Ubuntu, I think, but the underlying problem still remains and I think that should be addressed upstream.

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

The fix is only partial, please remove the file from $unud in firefox.(pre|post)rm

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

This sounds similar to bug 23273

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

If I remember correctly, this notification has now been implemented. Could someone please confirm this and then this bug is ready to close.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

needs upstream confirm

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

this might be considered an upstream issue, but since upstream is unlikely to care for this, we should keep it open and do more evaluation how to do this properly.

We now show upgrade notification asking user to restart which is a good step forward. However this is not good enough, because at that time firefox/thunderbird might already have been crashed.

So evaluation is needed on this.

[Chris Jones (cmsj)]

I think it's fair to say that the "lightbulb" notification is not working well enough. It's good for people who notice this sort of thing, but it's not something that's immediately obvious, and it doesn't scream for attention if it's initially ignored.

IMHO there are two options for making this experience more user friendly:

 1) Running firefox instances notice that they have been upgraded (either by monitoring their chrome directory, or being fed some signal. The former seems more robust in a multi-user world) and display very stern warnings to the user that they really really should click a button which causes firefox to restart itself as it would have if it had been upgraded via its own internal mechanism. Obviously the chrome for this would need to be made resistant somehow, so it wasn't wiped out when the upgrade happens. This is either an upstream issue, or something we would have to do. Do they ever have to care about this instance in Windows? If firefox can be deployed as a system-wide app rather than per-user, they must do.

2) Firefox updates should only be applied while restarting the computer (obviously the infrastructure for doing this does not yet exist, but I think I've seen some talk about doing more updates in this way, when they are fundamentally incompatible with being performed while people are logged in). This would require no effort from upstream, but would require a pretty large change in the way Ubuntu updates work.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

Quick status update.

Good news is that we have made progress. The light bulb is really something that never worked good enough; we improved the situation through ubufox. We disaplay a "restart notification bar" on top if you upgrade while running. Hitting the restart button usually works. Unfortunately there are still cases where even that restart button doesn't work. So its not yet the complete solution.

One idea to continue from here would probably be to set firefox into some kind of upgrade mode from outside (maybe through dbus or otherwise through XRemoteClient facility) when a system upgrade starts. This mode would not load new chrome or components that are not in memory yet and instead could ask the user to wait (till upgrade has finished) and finally restart (after upgrade has finished).

Not a simple task though ...

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

also Chris suggestion number 2) is also worth considering. The idea would be to schedule package upgrades during restart; however, i don't think its a good idea to proceed in this direction as it would certainly lead to an overall lower package quality in the long run as it would be considered OK to require restart after upgrades when designing packages/applications.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Sorry but Firefox-3.0 has reached EOL and will not receive updates can you please test with Firefox-3.5 from our repos.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

It was decided to rleease 3.0.18 after all.
is anyone able to reproduce in 3.0.17 or 3.5 both from repos

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

IIRC there is an upstream report on this. Can someone locate it or if not file a new one upstream

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 338785, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.