Fedora 37, firefox, thunderbird, and firefox derivativees like librewolf

F37 — it all looks perfectly wonderful, except it doesn’t work on my machine … firefox, thunderbird, or any firefox derivative like librewolf refuse to load or appear … my machine? … a Ryzen 5 5600, 32GB DRAM, an AMD W4300 FirePro workstation graphics card and Asus A520 based mainboard … nothing particularly “out there”

F36 works quite fine. F37? … Nope … disabling hardware acceleration in the Firefox based apps makes no difference … I have tried everything I can think of except for putting an nVidia or Intel GPU in the system, which I am not doing. I have tried the same configuration on an Intel i7-6700 using its iGPU, and all works no problems at all. So, there is something going on between the AMD W4300 it seems, and maybe the Ryzen.

running firefox from a terminal shows no errors, and the process appears in the process list as normal, and so would otherwise appear to be functioning fine, except there is no window … journalctl shows no error either …

retried in Cinnamon, Mate, LXDE, XFCE with the different default window managers that are default with each desktop environment … still no display, yet no apparent error

even tried the Mozilla release instead of the Fedora supplied firefox binary … still the same lack of display, or error …

In Fedora 36 everything works fine in all of these cases. I would also point out that I tried with the same kernels in both F36 and F37 … so, I dont where to look further.

How many monitors do you have connected?
When you run Firefox, e.g. in GNOME, do you see the little dot under its icon in the Overview, meaning that it’s running?
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I would be surprised if the number of monitors makes any difference, anyway, I tried with 1, and with 2 monitors … same result.

and yes, the dot under the icon is there, as one would expect, as I did say that firefox shows as running in the process list using top

Well, if there are no error messages and the process appears to be running, the window should be rendered somewhere. On many systems, a second (or third, fourth, etc.) monitor is picked up by the system when it’s on standby.
For instance, on the setup I’m typing right now, a commercial program always launches on my second monitor under GNOME. When I am not using the second monitor, I have to use a keyboard shortcut to bring the window to the main workspace (or physically unplug the monitor, or change the configuration from “Settings” → “Displays” or “Settings” → “Multitasking”).
Does Firefox appear in the Alt+Tab overlay?
On X11 you can use wmctrl to get a list of workspaces and windows, I don’t think there is a similar program for Wayland. This could help you locate it.

My next guess would be the hardware configuration as you said. Do you have the 5600G, 5600X or the 5600? If it’s the first, which has an integrated GPU, can you disable it in the BIOS? Are your displays connected to the motherboard video output, the one(s) from the graphics card or both?

And if you try starting Firefox in Safe Mode (firefox --safe-mode), does it still occur?

yes, tried in safe mode …

as for system, as I said, Ryzen 5 5600 , not X or G , the W4300 is in a PCIe slot, with a single monitor connected by Displayport … tried under X as well with alt-tab etc etc … you name it I have tried it … the window does NOT appear … I would point out that its not just Gnome either … tried Cinnamon, LXDE, XFCE, with all their different default window managers … and once again … it all works quite fine on F36

I would point out once again, its not just firefox, but firefox from fedora, firefox binary from mozilla, librewolf, and thunderbird, ie anything using the firefox engine, and to reiterate … F36 has no issues …

If you create a new user and log in, do you still have the problem?

Can you try wmctrl (on X11) and see what it finds?

done all of that … the results are the same from a fresh install, each with different desktop environments and window managers, in X, in Wayland, identical kernels, both new and previously existing mozilla profiles from F36, acceleration on and off, selinux on and off, second, third users … wmctrl is obvious in X and one of the first things done, and as expected, no window identifier exists, as would be expected … just for the record, it works fine in a VM using QEMU/KVM in F36 as well …

Well, you hadn’t mentioned everything you tried.
It’s one thing to have canvas drawing issues, but it is very weird to have the browser’s chrome not showing up, especially under a profile with no customization and with a freshly created user.

How do you mean?

Was it the same using the live system?

You should file a bug in bugzilla, Firefox’s maintainers also contribute upstream and they should be able to be of more help. Follow the steps that are possible in your case from this guide in order to provide the information that might be requested.

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Can you post the output of declare -x command to see if there is anything different in your environment?

This tells us nothing about the “how”. If you were expecting oracles and seers you’re in the wrong place.

I was referring to what’s rendered inside the browser window as opposed to the browser’s chrome.

Good luck to you then.

Although things turned a bit rude, I will post how I solved similar issue.

My system. AMD ryzen 2600 CPU and Radeon7850HD graphics card.
Problem
Fedora 36 works fine and firefox starts and works. After upgrade to Fedora 37 Firefox doesn’t start.
Removed Firefox and Reinstalled and still doesn’t start. Then restarting system there is lots of oops notifications about Firefox.
After restart firefox still doesn’t shopw any windows. Installed GNUIceCat browser and finally could browse internet. But using IceCat is quite limited and don’t want to bother it anymore.
Restart system and log in using GNOME on xorg. Started firefox and I Firefox works. Log oput and then log back in now using normal GNOME and not GNOME on xorg. And Firefox is working.

So hopefully this helps others facing this annoying issue.

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I am reporting that firefox 106, 107, 108 beta and 109 nightly, Firefox ETS all work quite fine in other distros based on Arch, Debian, Ubuntu (6 in total) using gnome 43 and other desktop environments and window managers also using various but identical kernels, including 6.1rc6 … the problem is somewhere in fedora 37 … having dealt with ask.fedora before, I am not responding any further … the level of denial that something could be wrong with Fedora has always been a feature in here, in my experience … so, thats it from me … ciao

Oh no. My problem with Fedora 37 and firefox is not yet over.
Booted system. Logged in in GNOME mode. Firefox doesn’t show up. Next start from terminal window firefox --safe-mode. And now error göxtest: VA-API test failed: No supported VAAPI profile found.

Killed not responding firefox processes and logged out. Logged in GNOME on xorg and and started firefox and it works. logged out and logged back in GNOME. Started firefox and it starts without issues and even plays youtube videos. So what is this firefox VA-API profile thing?

There were changes to the Mesa packaging in F37 having to do with Video Acceleration (VAAPI).

You may want to take a look at, Proprietary video codecs no longer hardware accelerated by default on AMD GPUs on Fedora 37