Firefox "needs to restart" bug & a #! v9.04.01 fix

Hi Folks,

Well quite a bit of today was involved with a bug with Firefox.  I thought it was an Ubuntu problem, but a search on the Internet showed other "non-debian" based distros with the same problem.  If you don't know what I'm talking about that's because you have not seen the persistent yellow bar telling you:

and no matter what you do, it comes back.

Here's the fix, you can read how I found it below if you are interested.  Some people want results, not the "how did you get it" part.

The simple #! fix is: reinstall what is needed:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall firefox firefox-3.0 ubufox

You do not need to "remove" or "completely remove" FF as others have suggested, and in the case of #! be careful, some Ubuntu fixes don't work here.

Here's the (shortened) story behind that.

I spent quit a bit of time with my friend Google today, and saw storys of hair pulling, "getting angry" etc, as this problem has been around since at least Ubuntu 8.04 with bug reports and all.  Fixes became non-fixes as soon as FF was updated and people were going crazy.  My wife did the "restart" cycle a few times and then just left it for me to fix when I got home.

One solution was:

Firefox menu > File > Quit
Then execute in terminal:
sudo killall -9 -r firefox
sudo apt-get purge firefox firefox-3.0 ubufox
sudo apt-get install --reinstall firefox firefox-3.0 firefox-3.0-gnome-support

When it's done, run firefox

To be on the safe side I copied ~/.mozilla to another location.  and something made me look with Synaptic and sure enough #! doesn't have firefox-3.0-gnome-support installed.

More research and I see where someone said, kill FF and "touch" a file. never having see the touch command I went looking; man touch:

       touch - change file timestamps

OK, that sounds good so I continued and I tried:

[sudo]sudo killall -9 -r firefox
touch ~/.mozilla/firefox/yurcadbd.default/localstore.rdf

to no avail, still get the "bug to restart".  GRRRR!!!!

OK, time to purge and reinstall:

1 bruloo@bruloo: ~
Sun Nov 01, 12:59 $ sudo apt-get purge firefox firefox-3.0 ubufox
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information      
Initializing package states... Done
Writing extended state information... Done
The following packages are BROKEN:
  firefox-3.0-branding 
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  firefox{p} firefox-3.0{p} ubufox{p} 
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 4059kB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  firefox-3.0-branding: Depends: firefox-3.0 (= 3.0.15+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1) but it is not installable
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Remove the following packages:
firefox-3.0-branding

Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
crunchbang-desktop recommends firefox
crunchbang-desktop recommends ubufox
Score is -641

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] q

WoW!! Thank God for the [q]uit option.

If I'm right:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  firefox-3.0-branding: Depends: firefox-3.0 (= 3.0.15+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1) but it is not installable
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Remove the following packages:
firefox-3.0-branding

removing that file means you can install the non-Ubuntu Firefox, but you don't get the apt-get support (Synaptic) from Ubuntu repos.

The last bit:

Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
crunchbang-desktop recommends firefox
crunchbang-desktop recommends ubufox

told me that if I changed the line

sudo apt-get install --reinstall firefox firefox-3.0 firefox-3.0-gnome-support

to

sudo apt-get install --reinstall firefox firefox-3.0 ubufox

I should be OK.

And I was ... at least for now.  Firefox is back to normal.

Have a nice day cruising the web.
Bruce

PS: Don't you hate it when your spelling checker says everything is OK so you hit [Submit] and "then" notice that that "is" should be "if". 

Last edited by Bruce (2009-12-01 17:07:12)