The Eight Year Old Bug

I just installed www/firefox from the FreeBSD ports again — I have been switching between www/opera, www/xxxterm, and www/chromium of late. I launched Firefox and noticed I already had some non-default settings. Right. I must have used Firefox before I removed all my ports and reinstalled only a handful necessities. I exited Firefox and removed ~/.mozilla. I then launched Firefox again. Firefox would not start:

ww@ironwood:~ $ firefox
WARNING: NS_ENSURE_TRUE(compMgr) failed: file /usr/ports/www/firefox/work/mozilla-release/xpcom/build/nsComponentManagerUtils.cpp, line 90
nsStringStats
 => mAllocCount:              5
 => mReallocCount:            3
 => mFreeCount:               5
 => mShareCount:              1
 => mAdoptCount:              0
 => mAdoptFreeCount:          0
XDM authorization key matches an existing client!XDM authorization key matches an existing client!XDM authorization key matches an existing client!XDM authorization key matches an existing client!XDM authorization key matches an existing client!Error: cannot open display: :0
nsStringStats
 => mAllocCount:              9
 => mReallocCount:            4
 => mFreeCount:               9
 => mShareCount:              5
 => mAdoptCount:              0
 => mAdoptFreeCount:          0
1|ww@ironwood:~ $ nsStringStats
 => mAllocCount:              5
 => mReallocCount:            3
 => mFreeCount:               5
 => mShareCount:              1
 => mAdoptCount:              0
 => mAdoptFreeCount:          0

1|ww@ironwood:~ $



I was surprised to see any sort of outright unstable behavior from good old Firefox. I did some DuckDuckGo-ing — Google for cute people — and found a bug originally filed in 2004. I skimmed the comments until I found my fix in the 12th comment: set environment variable XRE_IMPORT_PROFILES to 1. I was then prompted upon launching Firefox to optionally "Import Settings and Data" from Opera.

My system is running FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE:

$ uname -a
FreeBSD ironwood 9.0-STABLE FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE #2: Fri Feb 17 05:01:41 CST 2012     root@ironwood:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MYGENERIC  amd64

Firefox's pkg info is — pkgng from ports-mgmt/pkg (It is not in freshports yet):

$ pkg info firefox
firefox-10.0.2,1: Web browser based on the browser portion of Mozilla

I also checked the version Firefox itself reports:

$ firefox --version
Mozilla Firefox 10.0.2$

A little side-note is also that command does not produce a final newline character, so it clobbers my shell prompt. Maybe I will get around to fixing this.

It frustrates me to see bugs go unnoticed for years. I have seen this happen with bugs in Android and Chromium as well. The Android issue is that the Droid font included on Android devices does not have IPA glyphs nor glyphs for a handful of popular Unicode code points, so thus I can not read text that I have been able to read at any computer or iOS device for probably ten years now. The Chromium issue is that the browser makes certain assumptions that lead to the browser going into full-screen mode when the user really meant to maximize the browser window. Edit: Actually the Chromium issue is pertaining to an issue not relating to what I originally thought it did. I currently don't know whether is is still Chromium's fault.

I hope to contribute some time to help fix these pesky issues. If you have read this, comment on the bugs I wrote about — they all need dire attention. It becomes concerning when bugs are ignored, especially if there is a possibility a paid employee should be fixing them for you.