Firefox 19 slow without dbus-x11 installed

[Ben Galvin]

When upgrading Firefox from 16.02 to 19, our automated browser tests took approximately twice the time to complete. When interacting with the browser manually it appears to be noticeably sluggish. A large number of these errors were seen in the terminal:

(firefox:1489): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon:
//bin/dbus-launch terminated abnormally without any error message

(firefox:1489): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon:
//bin/dbus-launch terminated abnormally without any error message

(firefox:1489): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon:
//bin/dbus-launch terminated abnormally without any error message

(firefox:1489): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon:
//bin/dbus-launch terminated abnormally without any error message

Installing the dbus-x11 package resolved these errors and brought performance back to the same level as Firefox 16.02.

Additional information:

$ head -1 /etc/motd
Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-32-virtual x86_64)

$ uname -a
Linux ip-10-63-1-36 3.2.0-32-virtual #51-Ubuntu SMP Wed Sep 26 21:53:42 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ firefox -v
Mozilla Firefox 19.0

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS
Release: 12.04

$ apt-cache policy firefox
firefox:
  Installed: 19.0+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.2
  Candidate: 19.0+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.2
  Version table:
 *** 19.0+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.2 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     11.0+build1-0ubuntu4 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main amd64 Packages

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: firefox 19.0+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-32.51-virtual 3.2.30
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-32-virtual x86_64
AddonCompatCheckDisabled: False
AlsaDevices:
 total 0
 crw-rw---T 1 root audio 116, 1 Mar 7 11:31 seq
 crw-rw---T 1 root audio 116, 33 Mar 7 11:31 timer
AplayDevices: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu14
Architecture: amd64
ArecordDevices: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
AudioDevicesInUse: Error: command ['fuser', '-v', '/dev/snd/seq', '/dev/snd/timer'] failed with exit code 1:
BuildID: 20130227184535
CRDA: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Channel: Unavailable
CurrentDmesg: [2052933.116096] postgres (919): /proc/919/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/919/oom_score_adj instead.
Date: Thu Mar 7 11:36:59 2013
Ec2AMI: ami-e2ba2bd8
Ec2AMIManifest: (unknown)
Ec2AvailabilityZone: ap-southeast-2a
Ec2InstanceType: c1.medium
Ec2Kernel: aki-31990e0b
Ec2Ramdisk: unavailable
ForcedLayersAccel: False
IpRoute:
 default via 10.63.1.1 dev eth0 metric 100
 10.63.1.0/24 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 10.63.1.44
IwConfig: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Lspci:

PciMultimedia:

PciNetwork:

PrefSources: prefs.js
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
Profiles: Profile0 (Default) - LastVersion=19.0/20130227184535
RfKill: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
RunningIncompatibleAddons: False
SourcePackage: firefox
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
WifiSyslog:

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

What sort of environment are you doing these tests in? If you're doing it without a session bus, with things like libgconf still installed and with dbus-x11 uninstalled, then this is a completely unrepresentative and artificially crippled configration and I'd consider this not a bug.

[Ben Galvin (ben-galvin)]

This is a minimal install used for running automated browser tests on AWS. As you say, not a particularly representative example, so I'm happy for you to flag it as not a bug.

Thanks for looking into it.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Technically, if dbus-x11 is useful for Firefox, it should at least be a Recommends since it's not in the essential set. However, it is in the standard set and included in desktop based Ubuntu images, so this is a corner case.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]