How to debug Firefox's XUL startup (on Windows)
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I have a problem that causes Firefox to behave strangely during startup.
(Specifically, it displays the "Firefox seems slow... to... start" message, even though I didn't install any new extensions or anything like that.)

The function that displays that message is _showSlowStartupNotification in browser/components/nsBrowserGlue.js which is called from _trackSlowStartup which in turn is called by _onFirstWindowLoaded.

I want to debug that. How can I do that?

I can debug the Firefox binaries easily with WinDbg and Mozilla's symbol server. But that's not what I want. I want to debug the XUL, not the C++.

I can debug the XUL if I enable the Browser Toolbox, but only after the startup. Even if I set devtools.debugger.prompt-connection to false and run firefox.exe -jsdebugger to immediately open the Browser Toolbox, I get access to it only after the startup code has already been executed. Setting a breakpoint on the interesting function doesn't help as they are not persistent; restarting Firefox doesn't cause the internal XUL debugger to break on them.

So, any suggestions? Is there a way to debug Firefox's XUL from the early start?

Headlong answered 1/2, 2016 at 15:58 Comment(0)

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