Menus do not appear (via menubar, bookmark toolbar or right-clicking)
I just noticed the other day that my menus are no longer appearing in Firefox. I can see the File, Edit, etc. menu bar, but clicking on the word File does nothing. Pressing Alt+F also does nothing. Right-clicking in a web page doesn't show the usual popup menu. Clicking on things in the toolbars (like bookmark folders) don't show the menus.
I tried running in safe mode, but there is no change. I tried creating a brand new profile but the behaviour is still the same. Most of the troubleshooting steps recommend to disable acceleration, but I don't think this applies - for a start they all say to go to the Tools menu and I can't do this, but opening about:config there doesn't seem to be anything relevant in gfx.*
When I launch Firefox from the Linux command line, it says this a dozen or so times:
(firefox:5116): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
However this is nothing new - it has always worked before.
dbus appears to be running:
$ ps -A | grep dbus
690 ? 00:00:00 dbus-daemon 1173 tty1 00:00:00 dbus-launch 1174 ? 00:00:00 dbus-daemon
What's going on? Why have my menus stopped working??
Chosen solution
Unfortunately nobody could help there, but FWIW my distribution pushed out a new version of Firefox (I think - it checked for add-on compatibility when I loaded it but the version still says 14.0.1) and this seems to have fixed the problem - the menus now work. I haven't restarted since I was having the problem, so it can only have been caused by Firefox itself or one of the other system libraries that was upgraded.
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Which Firefox version did you install?
Is that from the Mozilla servers or via the repositories?
Is that a 32 bit version or a 64 bit version?
- Firefox 14.0.x: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html
Did you verify that you meet the system requirements and have all needed libraries?
Modified by cor-el
Thanks for the response!
It's via my distribution's repositories. 64-bit. I just downloaded the version from your link above (14.0.1), which turned out to be 32-bit, and there's no change. I don't get any D-Bus errors on load (only some complaints that a 64-bit plugin was the wrong ELF class and couldn't be loaded), but I still can't make any menus appear. I also tried downloading Aurora (16.0a2) with the same result.
The system requirements should be fine as I have been running Firefox on this machine since I bought it a few years ago, and being quad core with 8GB RAM it should be well above the minimum specs needed.
I'm thinking it's a bug that has been introduced somewhere along the way. Any ideas how I can troubleshoot?
Not really. You can try to ask advice on the support forum of your Linux distribution.
Did you try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox?
- Edit > Preferences > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"
I'll ask there and see if anyone can help. How do I disable hardware acceleration when I can't open the Edit menu? Is there an about:config option? I can get into about:config.
Chosen Solution
Unfortunately nobody could help there, but FWIW my distribution pushed out a new version of Firefox (I think - it checked for add-on compatibility when I loaded it but the version still says 14.0.1) and this seems to have fixed the problem - the menus now work. I haven't restarted since I was having the problem, so it can only have been caused by Firefox itself or one of the other system libraries that was upgraded.