[SOLVED] Firefox oddity

[mla]

Starting yesterday, Firefox became unusable on one of my machines. Both desktop machines are fully updated Mageia 5 and share the same ~/.mozilla directory (the problem is present whether it is in fact the same directory or just an exact copy). Originally, it was failing to start, crashing out with an XDR error. After I deleted some old, unused extensions this changed -- the browser starts and its window comes up, but it looks as shown in the attached image. I have removed and re-installed firefox, with no effect. Since the problem is obviuosly not within .mozilla, I tried moving .local and/or .kde4 out of the way -- no good. I can start firefox remotely on the machine on which it works, with display networked over X and that works fine, but it is a nuisance.

Any suggestions?

[mla]

NB... This is what it *should* look like.

[doktor5000]

That is on what Mageia release, what firefox version? What firefox theme do you use, the default? Have you tried starting firefox in safe mode yet?
I believe your issue comes from the fact that when moving to FF 45.x ESR we followed Fedora and switched from a gtk2 to a gtk3 build, which might explain those display issues.

Can you downgrade firefox to one of the 38.x versions and see if the problem goes away? If yes, please report this as a bug and post the link here, then I'll take a look.

[mla]

As I said, both machines are on fully updated (as of today) Mageia 5. So firefox-45.2.0-1.mga5. Default theme.

Pardon my ignorance, but how do I downgrade to FFF 38? I tried "urpmi --downgrade firefox", but that responded with

Code: Select all

The following package has to be removed for others to be upgraded:
firefox-45.2.0-1.mga5.x86_64
 (in order to install firefox-45.2.0-1.mga5.x86_64) (y/N)

[doktor5000]

I think in some cases you need to provide the full version and release of the package you want to downgrade to.
Or I don't remember well and the message doesn't make much sense, just say yes and see if urpmi downgrades to the previous version.
Although a language pack will be removed due to the dependencies unless you also provide the package name to urpmi --downgrade.

[mla]

OK, by default it just re-installs the same package -- not too useful. However, "urpmi --downgrade firefox-38.8.0" did the trick (after I worked out how to discover the previous firefox version). And yes, that cures the problem. I'll go and report it as a bug, as you suggested. But why should it only affect this machine? The other one (also fully patched Mageia 5) upgraded to version 45 without a problem.

[mla]

Bug report URL: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18725

[mla]

The cure turned out to be editing .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini to remove (comment out) the line "gtk-font-name=Liberation Sans Regular". Deleting the whole settings.ini file works too and is benign -- a new account is created without it anyway.