I updated my Fedora 31 Silverblue last night, something I do at the beginning and end of each day, nothing special just my typical flatpak update and then a sudo rpm-ostree upgrade after that was done. One of the ostree packages was Firefox 71, and it had some weird letters that I can’t remember anymore at the end of the package name. I always like to see “What’s New” in Firefox so instead of shutting down and going to sleep I did a restart so I could open it up and see.
It opened up and and I went to the Help > About Firefox > What’s New. 71 had been released that day, 12/3, which I thought was interesting because usually Fedora is a day or two behind. I closed out and forgot about it, then proceeded to stay up and install pcsx2 from flathub in the command line. When I tried to open up Firefox again to get a rom from my cloud service (I’ve kept the games I love over the years and installed them intermittently), nothing.
I’ve tried Firefox about a dozen times since and all I get is the “Firefox” listed near Activities with a spinning wheel for about 10 seconds and then nothing. In the next text is the log I could find using “journalctl | grep -i firefox” if anyone smarter than me can figure out why I’m having problems.
Firefox 71 is working on Silverblue 31.20191204.0 (2019-12-04T00:37:38Z) here.
First, check to make sure Firefox isn’t running already:
ps x | grep firefox
(If it is running, but you see no window, you can kill the process with killall -9 firefox and then try running it again.)
If Firefox isn’t already running (with no visible app windows):
Have you tried running Firefox in safe mode to see if it starts up?
firefox --safe-mode
If it does start in safe mode, but not normally, you may want to consider refreshing your Firefox profile. (You might want to back up your ~/.mozilla directory first with something like cp -al ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla-backup, of course, as refreshing restarts your profile from scratch and imports most, but not all, of your old settings, history, bookmarks, etc.)
You solved my problem AND provided me information on what was breaking, I really can’t thank you enough man. To top it all off I see you posted on the captive portal thread I started to… thank you, people like you make the open source community so awesome.
So I found out through your link that Privacy Badger was the offender for me. I’ve only ever used 4 extensions - Privacy Badger, Facebook Container, HTTPS Everywhere, and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials - but since FF 70 has all these tracker blocking features I’m sort of wondering if Privacy Badger and DDGPE are necessary at all. I already thought they might be redundant but they showed some different trackers blocked.
Maybe that is a question for a FF forum, but your feedback and/or opinion is appreciated. Thank you again, so much.