Ubuntu Wiki

Introduction

Note: Many of these tips will work with Thunderbird.

You can help Ubuntu developers fix Firefox and make the software better by providing them with "useful" bug reports.

Here are some instructions you should follow while filing a bug report on [https://bugs.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+filebug Firefox to launchpad.net]:

Try with a new profile

Many bad Firefox behaviors are in fact caused by one of the many third-party 'themes', 'extensions' and 'plugins'. These will go away with a new profile - that is, when Firefox is restored to default settings and without any extensions and themes.

Start Firefox using the command firefox -ProfileManager. You should now see the Profile Manager window.

Important note: From the Profile Manager you are also able to remove and rename profiles. Be very careful when deleting profiles, if you created the profile in a directory that already existed, the entire directory will be removed!

Click on the 'Create Profile...' button to start the 'Create Profile Wizard'. Click 'Next' and enter a descriptive name for the new profile. Click Finish to have Firefox create the new profile. You should now be taken back to the Profile Manager and the newly created profile should be listed. Select it and click 'Start Firefox'. Try to reproduce the bug with this new profile.

Note: you can go back to your own profile by starting Firefox using the command firefox -ProfileManager again, selecting your own profile, and clicking on 'Start Firefox'.

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile#new source

Be specific

Try to make sure that the developer will be able to reproduce the bug you are seeing. Provide every detail you can regarding the bug, especially an explicit statement of exactly which sequence of user actions are needed to reproduce the bug.

Use the terminal

Start Firefox from a terminal (under Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and copy-paste all the errors you see to the bug report. If the output is too long, create a new text file, copy-paste the output in that file, and attach it to your bug report as an attachment.

A website

If you are having a problem with a website, please include its link, along with the exact problem you experienced on the site. We would truly appreciate if you can also take the time to isolate what on the page is triggering the bug, and include it as an HTML snippet in the bug report if possible.

A crash

If you had a crash, provide exact steps to reproduce the crash. If you cannot reproduce the crash, provide details of exactly what you were doing prior to the crash. Then, follow these steps:

1. Install debugging symbols by doing: sudo apt-get install firefox-dbg

2. After closing all instances of Firefox, start Firefox from the terminal with the following command: firefox -g 2>&1 | tee ~/Desktop/gdb-firefox.log

   • Alternatively, you can also connect gdb to an already running Firefox process.

     1. First, you will need to obtain the PID for the running Firefox process as well as the full path to Firefox's binary: ps -o pid,command -C firefox-bin

     2. Then, connect gdb to the running Firefox process. For example, if the above command outputted: PID COMMAND 15018 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -a firefox, you would ignore the arguments passed to the command and run:  gdb /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin 15018 2>&1 | tee gdb-firefox.log.

3. Add the file gdb-firefox.log (on your Desktop) to the bug report you filed at launchpad as an attachment.

Specific issues

XML errors and broken UI after upgrade

After each release (eg Ubuntu Dapper 6.06, Edgy 6.10 and so on), some of our users report bugs that look a bit like this:

 XML Parsing Error: error in processing external entity reference
 Location: jar:file:///usr/lib/firefox/chrome/toolkit.jar!/content/global/netError.xhtml
 Line Number 10, Column 3:  %netErrorDTD;
--^

Other symptoms include missing UI elements after an upgrade or other kinds of XML errors in dialogue boxes or on firefox's stderr.

This is one of the things that typically happens if you don't restart your Firefox after an upgrade. Please do not report this as a bug. (We think it's a bug that you have to restart it but sadly it's beyond our resources to fix it.)