Firefox, Norton, and bookmarks - tracking down the problem
Mike Beltzner
As has been reported, some users of Norton security products (most
notably Norton 360 v2 and Norton Internet Security 2008.5 ) have
experienced a problem where after upgrading to Firefox 3 they were
unable to access or create new bookmarks or browsing history records.
Members of our QA team, support team, and Norton's QA teams have been
working together to figure out what's been causing this issue.
We're tracking our progress here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Firefox3/Investigation/Norton_360
A brief summary is:
- the issue is being caused by firefox.exe not being able to exit
cleanly on shutdown, and locking the SQL files used to store bookmarks
and history; exiting Firefox leaves zombie firefox.exe processes - you
can do this multiple times and get a bunch of them
- the zombie firefox.exe processes are being caused by an error in
appMan32.dll
- seems to be caused by incompatibilities between a component of
Norton (coffplgn.dll) and some Firefox add-ons, perhaps add-ons with
binary components (unclear as to how/why)
- can be reliably reproduced by: install Firefox 3, install Skype
add-on, and install CoolIris add-on
- unclear why the profile lock is being released despite the SQL
files being locked to the zombie firefox.exe process
- there is some degree of relation to jemalloc here as well; builds
done without jemalloc still end up creating zombie firefox.exe
processes, but do NOT retain a lock on the SQL files
At this time we're hoping that the Firefox development team might be
able to look at the issues (Tomcat will post a stack to the wiki page
shortly, as well as a screencap of what it looks like when it's
happening) and help us narrow further towards a solution.
cheers,
mike