simon.schönbeck.dk

Tag: crash

  • Fedora 44 and Firefox 154 crashing: “the specified toplevel id is already used”

    It does not happen often but today after rebooting Fedora Kinoite since the previous OS update Firefox crashed and would no longer load. This is a big issue since we all rely on the browser for everything plus the fact that my session includes tons of open windows and tabs which I would rather not lose.

    Luckily I already had a Flatpak version of Firefox installed from previously which I rarely use. It was installed for some codec issues with Ubiquiti Unifi Protect as well as for certain Youtube videos. This version does not contain all my user profile data or session but at least I could start digging around.

    A couple of weeks ago the Firefox Fedora package maintainer enabled KDE’s session restore feature (not the same as Firefox’s own session restore). However this broke the compatibility with Wayland crashing with “the specified toplevel id is already used“. To be fair I am not too much into the inner workings of XDG, so I tried to just get a work-around.

    The obvious one of starting in X11 actually worked. It launched Firefox and even restored my session. But it was utterly laggy compared to the smoothness of Wayland. If you want to try simply run this in the console:

    MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0 firefox

    Fortunately I am not the only user affected so there were a few bugs about the issue of which #2059617 has become the principal. Comment 10 mentioned the option to disable the Wayland session and it worked flawlessly. Find your Firefox profile in your home directory (e.g. $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxx.default-release) and add this line to the end of prefs.js:

    user_pref("widget.wayland.session-management.enabled", false);

    Now restart Firefox and all should be back to normal, Wayland working and your browser session restored.

    I left a comment in the same bug in case anyone needs to get up and running quickly. Hopefully a fix will be out soon so people that are not aware of these work-arounds can launch Firefox again.

  • AVG 8 LinkScanner crashes Firefox

    After upgrading to the latest version of the free anti virus application from AVG I encountered constant crashes of Firefox. It seems that AVG 8 includes a utility called LinkScanner which marks whether a website is supposedly a threat or safe upon using a search engine:

    AVG LinkScanner ThreatAVG LinkScanner No Threat
    I am not the biggest fan of these utilities as many false positives arise plus the user ends up losing his own
    criteria and relies solely on the utility’s advice instead of thinking and evaluating each site by himself. Nevertheless it may be suitable for complete beginners as a helping hand.

    Firefox did start to behave erratically after the AVG upgrade from version 7.5 to 8 so there was no real doubt about why it was happening, so I immediately disabled the LinkScanner component within the AVG user interface. This seemed to be the only part that could affect the browsers somehow:

    AVG LinkScanner disabled

    Firefox stopped crashing and all was fine again. There was just a little thing that kept nagging me. The little red exclamation mark by the clock in the traybar kept displaying now. It was not possible to know whether there was an update waiting or any other issue as the exclamation sign was on constantly. I ended up turning LinkScanner on again just to remove the exclamation.

    Back to Firefox crashing…!

    Until today when I again got so tired of the continuous crashes that I finally searched for the problem and located a very simple solution to it.

    Simply leave the LinkScanner component running so you do not get the annoying exclamation mark. Now launch Firefox and go to Tools > Add-ons and disable the AVG add-on. This would disable the AVG 8 LinkScanner component without interfering with anything else on your PC.