FireFox and Chrome borked after software update

[ahhyes]

Hi Guys,

Any ideas what would be causing this? Firefox appears to be all black, I installed Google chrome, and have a black address bar. I've tried reinstalling firefox, even deleting the mozilla profile. The problem wont go away..

I've attached a screenshot

[NickStone]

Re: FireFox and Chrome borked after software update

Do you think it could be due to the theme you have chosen for your desktop?

[ahhyes]

Re: FireFox and Chrome borked after software update

Do you think it could be due to the theme you have chosen for your desktop?

Nope. I tried setting the theme back to the default for KDE (i did have it on "Oxygen" which is the black looking theme), it made no difference, I've tried deleting the profiles for the affected browsers and even reinstalling them.. no go.. Funnily enough this only affects Firefox and Chrome. Rekonq seems to be unaffected.

[jlittle]

Re: FireFox and Chrome borked after software update

I guess you have something in the murky depths of GTK. You could try search for gtkrc files:

find . -name '*gtkrc*'

and rename them temporarily out of the way.

[ahhyes]

Re: FireFox and Chrome borked after software update

Thanks for the reply everyone. I managed to solve it. The solution was bizarre...

This is a friends computer that has this problem, so today I logged onto it, however I logged into my profile first instead of my friends, the problem was not visible in my firefox or chrome. I logged into the other users profile, the problem was there. I logged back into my profile, the problem had somehow bled into there. What this means is that I overlooked the fact that it may be user profile specific because if one had logged into the affected user profile first, the problem was persistent once logged in as another user.

What I did...

logged into the affected user profile and moved all directories starting with a "." out of the way into a backup folder. This essentially gave the user account a clean slate. Tested firefox and chrome, all good.

Since I was also suspicious it was gtk related, I began moving back application configuration directories one at a time. I started with .purple (for pidgin), logged out and back in to the account and tested the web browsers, all good. Then there was .xchat2, moved that back into the home dir, logged back in as the user, presto, black browser. Removed .xchat2 and restarted KDM and vola, the problem is gone. This KDM restart is necessary as once this corruption has begun, it stays there unless kde is fully restarted.

No idea what is getting loaded when .xchat2 is present, but since it's removal, the issue is gone.

Edit: I tried the trick above as posted by the previous poster with gtkrc, it did not work, hence why I went down a rather different avenue in finding the issue.

[SteveRiley]

Re: FireFox and Chrome borked after software update

So you have the program X-Chat installed, then?

[ahhyes]

Re: FireFox and Chrome borked after software update

So you have the program X-Chat installed, then?

yeah, it was installed. I've since uninstalled it via apt and told the user of that computer to use a different IRC client like kvirc etc as I have no idea why xchat was causing this problem (it was causing a problem even if xchat wasn't running at all), it's as though something problematic was being loaded either at login time or once another gtk app was loaded, I also noticed today that pidgin also had this corruption (black window) as well (in other words, it was affecting all gtk applications, not just the web browsers).