Bugs

Revision 48 as of 2008-05-06 11:09:28

Reporting Bugs

Introduction

You can help Ubuntu developers fix Firefox and make the software better by providing them with useful bug reports. Please realize that we need enough information to confirm it as a *bug* so the initial report must have enough for us to do that. Please see the following link on [http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html How to report Bugs]

You will find that you may need to use the Terminal for some of these commands. if you are not sure how to use a terminal, please see the [https://help.ubuntu.com/6.10/ubuntu/desktopguide/C/terminals.html Terminal Guide] for a basic introduction.

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

Problems with corrupt profiles are not handled in bug reports: if your problem went away with a new profile, please do not report the problem as a bug.

Start Firefox by entering the following command is a terminal: 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 Link to Mozilla Documentation (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 by running firefox. 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. Note this only works on Firefox 2.0.x; the latest Firefox 3 betas do not leave errors in terminal.

Specific Websites

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.

Crashes

Note the below instructions for this section do not work for Ubuntu Hardy users running Firefox3 betas. These users will receive "Couldn't find package firefox-dbg" because there is no dbg package created yet for Firefox3 beta users. As of now Firefox-3.0 users will need to use the following repos to get firefox-3.0-dbgsym and xulrunner-1.9-dbgsym:

deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com hardy main universe 
deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com hardy-updates main universe
#deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com hardy-proposed main universe #Hardy doesnt have this Repo yet.
deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com hardy-security main universe

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:

Install debugging symbols by typing the following in a terminal (or install it with Adept or Synaptic):

# sudo apt-get install firefox-3.0-dbgsym \
     xulrunner-1.9-dbgsym \
     libgtk2.0-0-dbg \
     libnss3-0d-dbgsym \
     libnspr4-0d-dbg \
     libpango1.0-0-dbg \
     libcairo2-dbg \
     libc6-dbg

After closing all instances of Firefox, start Firefox from the terminal with the following command:

firefox -g 2>&1 | tee ~/Desktop/gdb-firefox.log
... # some output
(gdb) run
... # run and reproduce crash
(gdb) bt full
... # full backtrace output
(gdb) thread apply all backtrace full 
... # all threads full backtrace output
(gdb) quit

Now ~/Desktop/gdb-firefox.log will contain infos we need to initially process your crash bug. So, please attach that file to your bug report.

Obtain a backtrace from an apport crash report (using gdb)

Install the debugging symbols for firefox (and some other dbg packages like in above point):

{{{ apt-get install firefox-dbg apt-get install libgtk2.0-0-dbg \

libnss3-0d-dbg \ libnspr4-0d-dbg \ libpango1.0-0-dbg \ libc6-dbg

}}}

Copy and paste in a xterm the following command:

{{{TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d) apport-unpack /var/crash/_usr_lib_firefox_firefox-bin.1000.crash $TMPDIR gdb -nx /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -core $TMPDIR/CoreDump -ex 'backtrace full' -ex 'thread apply all backtrace full' -ex 'quit' 2>&1 | tee gdb.log rm -fr $TMPDIR }}}

That command will run gdb against the coredump file included in the crash report that was generated when firefox crashed.

Upload the resulting gdb.log to launchpad.

One good thing to do is looking at the gdb output and search for missing dbg libraries or other warnings, install them and run again gdb.

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.)

Closed Bug Reports

If you find your bug report to be closed, it has been done by someone on our team for specific reasons. If you have a problem or wish to dispute the action, please use the bug report to ask for more information.

Bug Triage and Procedures

Visit [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs/Procedures BugProcedures] for an Introduction and best practices on how to process Mozilla bugs.

[:CategoryMozillaTeam], [:CategoryBugSquad]

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