I upgraded my system from Ubuntu 21.04 to 21.10. I previouslly had Firefox installed from a .deb After the upgrade to 21.10 when I tried to launch Firefox I get the following error;
I’ve removed and reinstalled the new Firefox snap. I get the same error when I launch it from the terminal.
When I launch from the graphical interface; toolbar> Applications> Internet> Firefox I get a different error;
Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.
This happens even following a full shutdown and restart.
Eventually, I removed the snap and installed Firefox from the .deb The new installation found my old profile, bookmarks and such and works fine.
The error messages you shared shouldn’t prevent firefox from starting.
If you’re willing to re-install the firefox snap (the snap and the deb can co-exist), I’d be interested in getting more information about this problem. If so let me know and we can continue the debugging here.
I have removed and reinstalled the Firefox snap. But I’m willing to give it another go. Should I uninstall the Firefox deb first? And assuming I get the same message (different from terminal and gui) how do you want me to collect any data?
Ok, no need to uninstall the deb. The first thing to do is to close the application and ensure it’s not running (the output of ps -ef | grep firefox should be empty).
Then run snap run firefox -version and share the output here.
Then run snap run firefox and let us know what happens, and the full output you get.
Then please share the output of snap connections firefox.
Some details about your hardware (CPU architecture, GPU, graphics drivers, …) would be useful, too.
I gave it a try and things didn’t go so well. Basically after 25 minutes I gave up. Here is what I did just so we are all in sync. First a shutdown and reboot. Firefox deb is still installed.
Here are the snaps installed at the start of this;
paul@p6t:~$ snap run firefox -version
Mozilla Firefox 93.0
Looks promising;
paul@p6t:~$ snap run firefox
Gtk-Message: 21:33:15.199: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 21:33:15.221: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
[GFX1-]: glxtest: libEGL missing
[GFX1-]: glxtest: libEGL missing
###!!! [Child][RunMessage] Error: Channel closing: too late to send/recv, messages will be lost
It sounds like the profile import wasn’t done yet. 25 minutes sounds a lot to copy a profile directory though. Can you share the output of du -sh ~/.mozilla/firefox ?
Regarding the glxtest: libEGL missing error, given the details you shared, it is very likely the problem that @jamesh mentioned with EGL-using snaps on Ubuntu 21.10 with NVIDIA.
329M should definitely not take that long to copy over. Would you mind retrying that? You’d need to rm -rf ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla, then launch the snap again from the command line and report how it goes.
@oSoMoN, I did what you suggested. I had to reinstall the firefox snap as I’d removed it after the last failed try. The import this time was on the order of 5 minutes. I didn’t actually watch it
paul@p6t:~$ du -sh ~/.mozilla/firefox
329M /home/paul/.mozilla/firefox
paul@p6t:~$ rm -rf ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla
paul@p6t:~$ snap install firefox
firefox 93.0-1 from Mozilla✓ installed
paul@p6t:~$ snap run firefox
Importing existing firefox profiles from /home/paul/.mozilla/firefox
Found default profile: r2lxv19d.default-release
Import done in 64.117 s
Gtk-Message: 15:13:23.229: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: 15:13:23.281: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
[GFX1-]: glxtest: libEGL missing
[GFX1-]: glxtest: libEGL missing
###!!! [Child][RunMessage] Error: Channel closing: too late to send/recv, messages will be lost
###!!! [Parent][RunMessage] Error: Channel closing: too late to send/recv, messages will be lost
paul@p6t:~$
Now, just before the two !!![Parent] messages, a Firefox popup window that says:
`
Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.
I did shut the system down, and restarted it. After login I tried the Firefox snap again and got the same results.
According to that log, the import took just over a minute. That’s still quite long to copy over 329MB, but at least it didn’t stall forever. Is this a mechanical hard drive?
Sorry for the late reply. Seeing that this is most likely the issue mentioned by James that affects other snaps, not just firefox, I’d suggest filing a bug against snapd (don’t forget to reference this post and the other, more general one).
Thanks!
For anyone having this problem on an Nvidia system, could you give the following a try? I don’t have such a system, so I’d be interested to see the results.
In a terminal, run snap run --shell firefox. This should drop you at a bash shell prompt within firefox’s confinement. In that shell, run the following commands:
If Firefox starts up correctly, could you try opening about:support in a tab, and check to see whether it looks like the Nvidia drivers are being used in the Graphics section.
This will remove the LD_LIBRARY_PATH elements added by $SNAP/snap/command-chain/snapcraft-runner related to host system OpenGL drivers. The drivers should still be available later on in the library path, since $SNAP/snap/command-chain/desktop-launch also adds /var/lib/snapd/lib/gl to the end.
This will hopefully let the copy of the libEGL driver multiplexer (aka libglvnd) from the gnome-3-38-2004 shadow the copy from the host system, while still making the actual Nvidia driver library available on the search path.
I have the Nvidia issues with other snaps, but do not have any such issues with the Firefox snap (all on Impish). I’m not sure whether that’s the same problem.
You could try adapting the instructions I’ve listed above. Basically change the snap run --shell invocation to match your snap, and the final exec line to match whatever is listed on the command: line of the snap’s $SNAP/meta/snap.yaml file. I’m not sure how well it will work for snaps not using the desktop extension, since their launch script could be quite different.
I had removed the Firefox snap and so first I installed it again (leaving the Firefox deb installed)
paul@p6t:~$ sudo snap list
[sudo] password for paul:
Name Version Rev Tracking Publisher Notes
firefox 94.0.1-1 701 latest/stable mozilla✓ -
paul@p6t:~$ firefox
###!!! [Child][RunMessage] Error: Channel closing: too late to send/recv, messages will be lost
paul@p6t:~$
I waited for a few moments and tried it a second time. This time firefox launched. But I wasn’t sure which one was running; the deb or snap. I also didn’t have a command prompt so I opened a second terminal window and got an unexpected error message
###!!! [Child][RunMessage] Error: Channel closing: too late to send/recv, messages will be lost
I got a popup window saying that “Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.”
Launching firefox from the GUI gives the same popup message