On Sat, 11 Jan 2020 17:03:05 -0500 Sam Varshavchik mrsam@courier-mta.com wrote:
I held all Fedora updates for the last couple of weeks, and only updated firefox in order to pick up the critical vulnerability fix. I was planning to update fully again next week, but decided to just grab the firefox update now. The firefox 72 rpm installed without conflicts, but firefox just kept flipping me the finger, shaped like a blank page. It was not crashing, and there were no error messages if I ran it from a terminal. Just a big F. U. white screen.
On a few occasions, Firefox started to load my home page, but reached the conclusion that https://mail.google.com/u/0 – my home page – was corrupted.
I determined that this ust be a hidden ABI breakage with one of the dependent packages. Firefox 72 started working again after I installed all available updates.
I reproduced this on three different machines, this sequence of events: firefix update is broke by itself, but starts working once all available Fedora updates are installed. Or if I downgrade to 71.0.15. But I ran out of available machines to experiment with. They're all now fully updated.
But I grabbed the complete list of packages that was updated on one of the boxes, if anyone wishes to find the ABI breakage violator.
One of the following packages must have an ABI break in it, that the current firefox build has a dependency on:
My guess is nspr and nss.