Firefox/Thunderbird problems after update

After the last update I have consistent, repeatable tab crashes with particular sites in Firefox and Thunderbird crashes whenever I try to write or reply to an e-mail.

Firefox

Some sites seem to always crash; others are a bit mixed, e.g. clicking the link to Welsh language in the Wikipedia article Colloquial Welsh morphology caused a tab crash. Wikipedia talk pages also cause a tab crash.

I’ve tried creating a fresh profile and downloading the binary and running that with a new profile, but the results are the same. The Flatpak version has no problems.

Attempting to open the browser console (Ctrl+Shift+J or from menu) results in an immediate crash, but only with the installed FF.

With tab crashes I get output about “Channel errors” repeated several times, but the bug reports mentioning this all seem inconclusive.

Terminal: (repeated a few times)

###!!! [Parent][PContentParent] Error: Send(msgname=PHttpChannel::Msg_DeleteSelf) Channel error: cannot send/recv

journalctl: core dumps ends with…

Stack trace of thread 573370:
#0  0x00007fcff0ab25e2 n/a (libfreetype.so.6 + 0x345e2)
#1  0x00007fcff0a91fc9 FT_Load_Glyph (libfreetype.so.6 + 0x13fc9)
#2  0x00007fcff0ae7ee9 n/a (libfreetype.so.6 + 0x69ee9)
#3  0x00007fcff0a92269 FT_Load_Glyph (libfreetype.so.6 + 0x14269)
#4  0x00007fcfe9d55c27 n/a (/home/sean/bin/firefox/libxul.so + 0x56c5c27)
ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

Browser console crash produces a similar error.

Terminal:

ExceptionHandler::GenerateDump cloned child 577851
ExceptionHandler::SendContinueSignalToChild sent continue signal to child
ExceptionHandler::WaitForContinueSignal waiting for continue signal...
Exiting due to channel error.
[repeated many times]

Thunderbird

Disabling all add-ons doesn’t help, but a new profile does. Maybe some change has triggered a problem in what is quite an old profile.

Considering I monitor about 10 accounts & have lots of filters transitioning will be painful, but doable. For anyone dealing with this, the command-line switch -no-remote allows running separate instances of FF/TB with different profiles.

Hello @Moilleadoir :wink:

According to the trace, it should be a problem of libfreetype.so.6 so try to up/downgrade these packages:

sudo downgrade --ala-only freetype2 

Btw… seems firefox is not installed globally:

So why not installing it via pamac?

It is installed via pamac. I just also downloaded the binary to see if it was some kind of packaging issue.

Oh great! Now space in home is being rapidly eaten by .xsession-errors. Thank you VLC!

[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer rendering failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer features failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer attributes failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer rendering failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer features failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer attributes failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer rendering failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer features failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer attributes failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
[00007f5dec034360] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer rendering failure: An invalid handle value was provided.

Using downgrade I get an error: package missing required signature.

After a bit more experimentation, I’ve confirmed I can use the flatpak version with my old profile + add-ons.

While this is a kind of workaround, it’s not really practical because the flatpak version cannot communicate with my password manager.

Flatpak Firefox uses libfreetype.so.6.18.0, but the system version is libfreetype.so.6.18.2.

Can I (how do I) safely downgrade freetype2?

I don’t understand why no one else is experiencing these problems if it’s caused by a library that everyone uses.

Manually copying libfreetype.so.6.18.0 from /var/lib/flatpak... to /usr/lib and linking as libfreetype.so & libfreetype.so.6 fixes both the old Thunderbird profile and Firefox.

This seems desperately hacky though.

I could just say, that I run Firefox all the time and it never produces that error on stable branch, also not on unstable branch.

That could explain, that the signatures of the update system are broken. So eventually you run a partially updated system.

I also never had this kind of problem before the last update.

Rather than jumping to conclusions about ‘partial updates’, how can I find out what the missing signature error actually means?

sudo rm -Rv /var/lib/pacman/sync
sudo pacman-mirrors -c <put-in-country-name>
sudo pacman-mirrors -f 10
sudo pacman -Syyuu

I think I’ve recently done all this, but OK.

sudo pacman -Syyuu
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core                                                                              169.1 KiB  1084 KiB/s 00:00 [##################################################################] 100%
 extra                                                                            1854.2 KiB  8.23 MiB/s 00:00 [##################################################################] 100%
 community                                                                           6.9 MiB  9.87 MiB/s 00:01 [##################################################################] 100%
 multilib                                                                          182.0 KiB  5.39 MiB/s 00:00 [##################################################################] 100%
 sublime-text                                                                     1841.0   B  2023   B/s 00:01 [##################################################################] 100%
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

Well how should I know, if you don’t tell?

Same error, when you run it in safe mode?

firefox --safe-mode

Yes, same in safe mode, same with new profile. It’s only different in flatpak, which uses an earlier libfreetype.

So I updated my laptop to the latest stable release and have this:

$ pamac info freetype2 | grep -i version
Version               : 2.12.0-1
$ pamac info firefox | grep -i version
Version               : 99.0.1-1

And it works without problems.

Same.

$ pamac info freetype2 | grep -i version
Version               : 2.12.0-1
$ pamac info firefox | grep -i version
Version               : 99.0.1-1

You could reinstall/resync those packages.

pacman -Suy thunderbird firefox freetype2

Well, then I guess there no other way than debug the issue, since it is a specific one on your system.

  • Maybe because of language? Change it to default EN.
  • Maybe a GPU issue? Disable it in Firefox.

I think with the arrival of libfreetype.so.6.18.3 this problem has gone away.