Linux @lemmy.ml somethingsomethingidk @lemmy.world 8 mo. ago

(Almost Solved?) Firefox flatpak started taking 3+ minutes to start?

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.

28 comments

It usually does that for me when the XDG Desktop Portal borks. Run it from a terminal (flatpak run) and see if it complains about not being able to find a "settings" portal. You can also try to restart the xdg-desktop-portal.service user unit.

No joke, XDP has been so fucky on Hyprland, I have a keybinding to restart it.
- I tried restarting portal, didn't work. systemctl status for xdp did show an error for hyprland about a config file. But I'm running on sway mainly. I just tried out different DE's to see if anything changed.
  
  Here's flatpak output
  
  flatpak run --verbose io.gitlab.librewolf-community F: No installations directory in /etc/flatpak/installations.d. Skipping F: Opening system flatpak installation at path /var/lib/flatpak F: Opening user flatpak installation at path /home/auser/.local/share/flatpak F: Opening user flatpak installation at path /home/auser/.local/share/flatpak F: Opening user flatpak installation at path /home/auser/.local/share/flatpak F: /home/auser/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/23.08/329ad0f04e21dc3234accff013641299e13a9eb2f1b2908129692b4755393789/files/lib32 does not exist F: Cleaning up unused container id 75319174 F: Cleaning up per-app-ID state for io.gitlab.librewolf-community F: Allocated instance id 821024549 F: Add defaults in dir /io/gitlab/librewolf-community/ F: Add locks in dir /io/gitlab/librewolf-community/ F: Allowing dri access F: Allowing wayland access F: Allowing pulseaudio access F: Pulseaudio user configuration file '/home/auser/.config/pulse/client.conf': Error opening file /home/auser/.config/pulse/client.conf: No such file or directory F: CUPS configuration file '/home/auser/.cups/client.conf': Error opening file /home/auser/.cups/client.conf: No such file or directory F: Running '/usr/bin/bwrap --args 43 /usr/bin/xdg-dbus-proxy --args=45' F: Running '/usr/bin/bwrap --args 43 librewolf'
  
  That's more or less what mine says. What about journalctl, does it print anything in red?
Sometimes some programs and some downloads have weird slowdowns like this when my VPN is on, even though others remain completely unaffected
- All vpn things are off (i.e. wireguard and tailscale)
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.
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?
  
  I mean, you could, sure.
  
  As a next sensible step though, I'd start firefox from the CLI with more verbose logs enabled.
Also a dbus notification daemon (whichever you use) may be having problems. Things hang inexplicably if it's not running.
- I'm using dunst and it's running. I dont get notifications often, so I opened element to get some. Element isn't working either lol
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?
Install perf and use the app hotspot or just perf itself to run the command and see what happens
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.
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.
I've been considering switching to Linux, but did you say Firefox takes 30 seconds to start? Is that standard? Edit: what a strange bunch you are to downvote a random question.
- No, it opens without delay.
  
  Excellent, thank you.
  
  Yeah I am on a potato, i just gave that as a reference. Its really probably more like 10 the first time it opens. After that its faster.
- Non-sense, any linux, even the most wasteful in resources, ubuntu, mint, manjaro, debian, fedora, gnome plasma DE, uses a fraction of resources to start and execute whatever. I have 2-3 friends running daily on early/mid 2core intel/amd machines where w10/11 wouldn't even boot!
  
  @Suspiciousbrowsing @somethingsomethingidk
We warned you before jumping onto every new buzzword and new shiny thing pushed by red hat. You should have listened to us.

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