While this seems a bit inconsistent - safe-mode and fresh profile works, but only sometimes - and I can’t make heads or tails of it
this:
makes no sense and is not correct either
It’s a bit like trying magic - hoping that doing something will achieve something, when it objectively can’t.
When I proceed to remove firefox with: sudo pacman -Rsn firefox
all that gets removed is … firefox
nothing else
There are no configuration files to be left behind - except for the profile in ~/.mozilla
and perhaps the cache ~/.cache/mozilla
which will of course not be touched by removal of the program - nothing in the $HOME directory will be.
When I uninstalled Firefox I purposely made sure to delete the firefox folder under ~/.mozilla so everything would be removed, but the problem remains. The strange thing is that this is an intermittent problem. Sometimes it works on the first try (although that’s rare), usually it works on the second try (after killing the first process), but sometimes it won’t work until Firefox prompts me about safe mode. It’s weird!
in my desperation, I have installed firefox-esr 102.5.0esr from mozilla in /opt (outside the box). Start from terminal and firefox runs.
The same im all my other user accounts.
Then I try it with firefox 107 … the same issues before.
it seems to be a firefox problem.
I also have reason to believe, that it is a Firefox issue.
It behaves exactly the same way for me, even though I explained it differently in my thread:
I can confirm the issue described here. Starting Firefox - regardless of whether this is from the menu or from a Konsole command line, regardless of whether it’s the latest version from the repositories, from Snap, or from a download from the Mozilla site - creates 3 instances of firefox-bin visible in the system activity monitor, but without any window. There’s no error message.
Repeated attempts to start Firefox (I had a whole 18 processes “firefox-bin” running at one point earlier today) eventually result in one of these processes turning “zombie”. I don’t know whether this matters, but after this the Firefox dialogue box appears on the screen to tell me that Firefox is already running but not responding. At that point, I can “killall firefox-bin” and start Firefox again. This time a SINGLE “firefox-bin” process is started, and a Firefox window opens in the expected way. Firefox works perfectly after this. Closing the window and starting Firefox again also works as expected. But this lasts only until the next system shutdown and reboot, after which the faulty behaviour described above reappears.
By contrast, as others have explained, simply killing and restarting Firefox doesn’t work reliably.
This is a very annoying problem. Firefox is the only application I use literally every day.
Well as I showed in later post on KDE at least … problem is only with start-up of Firefox … that spawns multiple process identities and all are “Firefox” I can’t tell what exactly these are …
But I can absolutely perfectly resume start-up by killing the last process identity as I have shown on the picture of reply 31 (Firefox runs without interface - #31 by ff8idiot). After that only the first process identity remains and Firefox GUI window frames do spawn. At least on KDE it’s consistent in this start-up behaviour.
But absolutely nothing else helped …
downgrade to 105.x (so whatever version expect perhaps very old ones change nothing)
upgrade, complete removal and installation of latest version of Firefox also don’t work
removing .mozilla configuration under /home/xxx/
and exactly same if you rename .mozilla to whatever else so Firefox can’t find files anymore
startup from console with any arguments and there is no errors reported at all
firefox --new-window about:processes can’t be used for start-up since no GUI (graphic user interface) will spawn and you have nothing to look at.
It’s just that start-up of Firefox that freezes up. After unfreeze with killing the last of Firefox process identities, Firefox just works perfectly as always … with all od my settings and extensions and tabs as I want them and should be.
Killing and restarting all of Firefox processes and re-attempting whole start-up again is just overkill. And even if you do and eventually arrive to this dialog:
You can just hit [Open] to have all the tabs re-opened, since Refresh resolves nothing about start-up. But with [Open] you have all extensions disabled. And as a result you have to re-start Firefox again to have extensions re-enabled … and again chances are start-up problem might just happen all over again … after you perhaps already re-started whole Firefox like 8 … 12 (or even more) times.
So the problem is just mildly annoying, since it requires us to involve ourselves in start-up … But with killing all Firefox processes and re-starting we ourselves are just escalating the problem.
Just closing Firefox with Ctrl + Q and confirming with [Close and Quit] put me back into another episode of “Dude, where is my Firefox” after I try to (re)run Firefox again.
I need to mitigate Firefox startup again with
kill $(pgrep firefox | tail -n 1)
But i want you to know this works and I can start Firefox 100%. Hope this helped anyone.
Starting from console this time did show an error though:
It’s been hit and miss with this issue for the last few days. Some days i have the issue, but other days FF starts up right away. I’m starting to wonder if on the days I don’t have the issue are those days were I let the computer sit for a few minutes after booting (to go get a coffee or something) instead of starting FF right away. I can’t see why this would make a difference, but other than some other random thing happening, this is the only difference I can see.
Funny enough I upgraded my laptop from the LTS Ubuntu to the latest version last night and now I’m having this exact same problem. To me this says it’s a Firefox issue not a Linux issue unless it’s a common module that both Ubuntu and Manjaro share somehow.
Does not even start Firefox … Nor does [Clear Startup Cache] change anything. No matter if I reach to about:support page from console or from already open instance.
It isn’t even Linux distro issue, much less Manjaro’s issue.
Last I checked for actually reported error with [GFX1-]: glxtest: VA-API test failed: process crashed. Please check your VA-API drivers
It’s problem with AMD drivers that are within mesa (mesa-vdpau) and indeed … mesa was upgraded 22.1.7 => 22.2.x now at beginning of November 2022.
I checked https://gitlab.manjaro.org/-/snippets/810/raw/main/boxit-update-2022-11-02-s.txt Gitlab changelist for 2022-11-02 Majaro packages upgrade (search for mesa and mesa-vdpau).
Also I know Ubuntu LTS (22.04.1) has mesa at 22.0.x, but latest (22.10) has mesa at 22.2.x. Weirdly enough I have no issues using Lubuntu 22.10 at work, but that one runs as Hyper-V virtual machine so no graphic card.
I downgraded mesa packages back to 2.1.7 and Firefox now started perfectly a few times even after machine reboot … so it seems so far it has worked for me:
After reboot of machine it opened Firefox on first try. Also closing and re-opening turned out to be without any problems… so far.
But this is another “can of worms” solution, because mesa and integrated drivers will be inevitably upgraded and shipped with all Linux distributions … so eventually I will have to go along with these upgrades. Or something might just break eventually, since package x and y might become out-of-sync.
There were mesa Radeon driver upgrades this morning and for a few minutes I had hope that they would fix the issue, but no. It took me several tries to get Firefox to open. Even killing the process and trying again didn’t help. The only thing that eventually allowed me to start FF was starting it in Safe Mode (after being prompted). After that FF worked normally even when not in Safe Mode.
I was hoping that yesterdays Manjaro update should solve the problem.
There were both an Firefox update, as well as a kernel update.
It didn’t help, though.