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Unable to start firefox: XPCOMGlueLoad error

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  • Last reply by jonaslb

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As the title says, I am unable to start firefox. This happened after a recent upgrade from Kubuntu 16.04 to 16.10. I have attempted reinstalling firefox as well as "libmirprotobuf3" with no success,

When attempting to start firefox from a terminal, the following error returns: $ firefox XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /usr/lib/firefox/libmozgtk.so: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmirprotobuf.so.3: undefined symbol: _ZNK6google8protobuf11MessageLite39InternalSerializeWithCachedSizesToArrayEbPh Couldn't load XPCOM.

As the title says, I am unable to start firefox. This happened after a recent upgrade from Kubuntu 16.04 to 16.10. I have attempted reinstalling firefox as well as "libmirprotobuf3" with no success, When attempting to start firefox from a terminal, the following error returns: $ firefox XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /usr/lib/firefox/libmozgtk.so: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmirprotobuf.so.3: undefined symbol: _ZNK6google8protobuf11MessageLite39InternalSerializeWithCachedSizesToArrayEbPh Couldn't load XPCOM.

Chosen solution

Obscenely enough, Google led me to Twitter of all places for an answer.

The tweet-"convo" further down led me to look into /usr/local/lib where a bunch of libproto* files were hanging out. I moved them into a tmp folder. Firefox now works.

https://twitter.com/a_meba/status/777786373721952256

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Hi

Thank you for your question.

I have had a look into this and believe that this may be linked to the version of GTK that you are using. I recommend having a read of this earlier question that may help you with this.

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@Seburo The version of libgtk-3-0 used on ubuntu is 3.20.9-1ubuntu2. This is quite a few versions higher than the required 3.4.

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Chosen Solution

Obscenely enough, Google led me to Twitter of all places for an answer.

The tweet-"convo" further down led me to look into /usr/local/lib where a bunch of libproto* files were hanging out. I moved them into a tmp folder. Firefox now works.

https://twitter.com/a_meba/status/777786373721952256