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“Couldn’t load XPCOM” after Firefox upgrade

After Mozilla Firefox 3.5(.1) was finally unmasked in Portage, I upgraded from 3.0. Unfortunately, after the update, Firefox would not start anymore and when started from a terminal, it would leave me with a cryptic “Couldn’t load XPCOM.”.

Searching around for this error did not provide me with many easy to apply solutions. I found quite a few forumposts and a Mozilla Dev page on this specific error.

In this case, the forumposts lead me to the rather easy solution: if, when using Gentoo, you encounter a problem with dependencies, simply run revdep-rebuild:
revdep-rebuild -p
In this case, nss turned out to be the culprit and after a remerge (rerun revdep-rebuild without the -p flag) Firefox 3.5 would load as expected.

If you happen to find this page, but are not a Gentoo, but a different Linux or even a Windows or Mac OSX user, try some of the suggestions suitable for your OS, found in the Mozilla Developers Center.

[edit]28 July: according to the visitor numbers, I’m not the only one to experience this error. If people want to let me know whether this did or did not solve the issue for them, leave a comment below.[/edit]

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 11:34 and is filed under Desktop, Gentoo Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.



6 Responses to ““Couldn’t load XPCOM” after Firefox upgrade”

  1. Danny Bruce says:
    28 July 2009 at 15:33

    Thanks for blogging about this. Woke up this morning to the same problem. The reason I stick with Gentoo is because of the great amount of help that comes from the community.

    Reply
  2. Alexander Wigen says:
    28 July 2009 at 15:50

    On newer versions of revdep-rebuild you will have to run something like this:
    revdep-rebuild — -av

    – to pass options to emerge
    -av to ask before executing the merge and be verbose about it. This also saves you running revdep-rebuild twice.

    Reply
    • Ewald says:
      29 July 2009 at 12:19

      That is indeed a good idea, you could add
      EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--ask --verbose"
      to your make.conf to avoid having to ever add -av to any emerge command you invoke… but that does not work when revdep-rebuild triggers Portage.
      So, yeah:
      revdep-rebuild -- -av
      Thanks!

      Reply
  3. Cynyr says:
    2 August 2009 at 18:44

    I should have known to try revdep first. I wonder if there is an option to have portage run it after a “emerge -avuD world” for me.

    Reply
  4. Mikayel says:
    23 September 2009 at 17:53

    Thanks, it did solve my problem on Gentoo. FF 3.0.x refused to start. Problem gone after nss re-emerge.

    Reply
  5. dunbur says:
    7 July 2010 at 03:05

    Thanks! I am not running gentoo but suse, but your link to the Dev Center help and I was able to identifiy the missing dependencies.

    Reply

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