11.17.09

Mac OS X 10.6.2, your fonts, and launching Camino 2

Posted in Camino, Software at 12:34 am by Smokey

Many of you might have noticed that, after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.2, Camino 2.0b4, Camino 2.0rc1, or Camino 2.0.1pre/2.1a1pre nightly builds have started crashing on launch or shortly after launch, perhaps as the first page was loading. (Some of you may have noticed these crashes ever since Mac OS X 10.6 arrived, but the font changes in Mac OS X 10.6.2 seem to have made the crashes much more widespread.) You might even be one of the people who have submitted one of these crash reports.

I have some good news and some bad news about these crashes. The good news is that we’ve been looking at the problem for a while now, and Mozilla’s font gurus, John Daggett and Jonathan Kew have a couple of theories about the cause of the crashes (probably Mac OS X font cache corruption, yay! ). In addition, we generally know how individuals can “fix” the cause of the crashes on their own Macs.

The bad news is that the individual “fix” so effective that we aren’t currently in contact with anyone who is still experiencing this problem, and reversing the “fix” doesn’t cause the crash to reappear. This makes it much more difficult to determine what exactly is wrong and to find the best way to fix the Mozilla code to make whatever the underlying problem is not crash Camino, now or in the future, for everyone.

If you’re currently experiencing this crash, we could use your help. There are questions in need of some answers, and we’ll probably be able to generate some test builds (to log additional information and eventually to test proposed fixes) soon. Please comment in bug 514114 if you’re seeing this crash. (If you can’t get Camino to launch in order to check about:crashes for your crash ids, you can open the Camino inside the Breakpad folder inside the Library folder in your users’s Home folder and look for files with names in the format of CrashID=bp-0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108.dmp; paste the bp-0c24401b-93b6-4f7e-bcf7-8e4062091108 part into the search field on crash-stats to find your report.)

Finally, if you just want to make the problem go away and can’t help us track down the cause of the crash, you should open Font Book, check for and resolve any duplicate fonts (in the Edit menu), and validate all of your fonts, removing any ones that Font Book flags as having problems (in the File menu). You may also need to restart your Mac after removing duplicate and corrupted fonts.

Thanks for your help investigating this crash; we hope we’ll soon be able to make Camino stop crashing for everyone who is, or will be, experiencing this problem on Mac OS X 10.6.

Update (2009-11-17): John came up with a patch that should fix the crash, and it was reviewed and approved this evening. The fix should appear in tomorrow’s (2009-11-18) Camino 2.0.1pre, 2.1a1pre, and Firefox 3.0.16pre nightly builds.

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