Mozilla Firefox on OES 2015 fails to launch with XPCOM error after upgrade from OES2

  • 7022555
  • 15-Jan-2018
  • 15-Jan-2018

Environment

Open Enterprise Server 2015 (OES 2015) Linux Support Pack 1
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 4 (SLES 11 SP4)

Situation

After upgrading to OES 2015 SP1, the Mozilla Firefox browser fails to start. 

Executing the /usr/bin/firefox program directly in a terminal returns the following error:

hostname:~ # /usr/bin/firefox
XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /usr/lib64/firefox/libxul.so:
/usr/lib64/libgio-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_thread_gettime
Couldn't load XPCOM.

Resolution

Remove SLES10 firefox3-* packages from the server.

Package list:

firefox3-atk
firefox3-atk-32bit
firefox3-cairo
firefox3-cairo-32bit
firefox3-glib2
firefox3-glib2-32bit
firefox3-gtk2
firefox3-gtk2-32bit
firefox3-pango
firefox3-pango-32bit

You can copy and paste this command into a terminal to remove all of these packages in one go:

hostname:~ # zypper rm firefox3-{atk,cairo,glib2,gtk2,pango}{,-32bit}

Cause

The distribution upgrade from OES2/SLES10 SP4 to OES 2015 SP1/SLES11 SP4 failed to remove these SLES10 firefox3 packages.