Edit:
I turned off my wifi card, and now it launches immediately. Of course, what is a browser with no internet. But I guess there’s something about the network I moved to thats causing the delay. I’ll try a different network tomorrow and update for science
OG post: This applies to librewolf and firefox flatpaks. Just to preface, I’ve been using these flatpaks for years and never experienced anything like this.
This morning I did my business as normal with no issues. I usually open and close firefox alot and it takes maybe 10-30 seconds to start.
Then I shutdown for awhile. Came back and fired up firefox… nothing happened. The process is not using any cpu, it just sits. I kill the process and try again nothing changes. After 3-5 minutes, the window finally pops up.
My system installation of firefox works fine. So does the flatpaks for qutebrowser and tor browser. I ran flatpak repair and reinstalled them. Nothing has changed.
I didn’t make any changes to my system. There were no significant updates. I have no idea why this started.
If anybody has any tips on troubleshooting this, I would appreciate it.
Btw I’m on fedora39, and I’ve tested this on sway, gnome, hyprland, and gnome on xorg.
I’m also having this issue on my desktop with Firefox flatpak connected via Ethernet and Librewolf deb on my Surface Pro 8 via WiFi. On the SP8 it opens immediately on disabling WiFi or switching off my VPN which seems bizarre but at least partially lines up with your experience.
I’m an uninformed casual on Linux but if I can help diagnose/resolve this lmk
You could try dmesg -w in a terminal before you start firfox and see if any messages come through.
Can you still access the internet with another program?
This could be a firefox issue, and not a flatoak issue as I assumed. Do you have another version of firefox on the system? If so what version?
They all look to be 123.0, though bizarrely the version advertised as flatpak in About Firefox doesn’t pause/delay before opening but the other version does. No messages come through on dmesg -w unfortunately, I’m pretty stumped. The only clue I have is that the version of Librewolf I have on my desktop installed through the Pop Shop doesn’t delay opening but the same version on my SP8 installed through deb does.
Ultimately it does point towards FF in show way?
I noticed that as well. I don’t know why and it seems very random. It happened on my virtual computer with a AMD GPU but my laptop seems unaffected.
Could you leave journalctl -f running while Firefox is starting? Anything interesting happening right after initiating the start and/or before it actually starts?
The only thing that came up was some memory allocation/cgroup/.slice stuff for the container.
I’m not on that network anymore, and the problem is gone. So I cant reproduce.
Maybe I should have run wireshark?
Good old flatpak. Based on this you can expect it to take roughly thirty thousand years next time you need to restore a system backup.
What version of xdg-desktop-portal-* package do you have installed? If it’s -gnome try replacing it with -gtk, see if that helps.
The gnome portal is not running. The gtk and wlr portals are, as they have been for months with no issue.
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.x86_64 0.7.1-1.fc39
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.x86_64 1.15.1-1.fc39
But is the gnome portal installed? Firefox may still try to use it if it’s there.
You don’t lose anything by uninstalling the gnome portal, the gtk portal takes over.
