Tonight, I was surfing when Firefox suddenly stopped responding. I waited a while and then tried to close the window I was working in but nothing happened. I tried a few more times (using both the X and right clicking on the tab in the windows list) and finally it popped up and said it wasn't respponding. did I wasnt to kill it. I really needed to bookmark a few pages I had open in other windows so I didn't want to kill it. I let it sit for about an hour and then came back and still nothing. About the same time Firefox stopped responding, Thunderbird did too. So, I finally killed both of them, reopened them and there was no text. Images and the underlines in menus showed up but that's it. I was able to ctrl-l and then type a url and it opened. However, once again, no text.
I rebooted and still no text.
I then removed and reinstalled both with

rpm -ev --nodeps mozilla-nspr mozilla-nss mozilla-nss-devel mozilla-nspr-devel mozilla-devel firefox mozilla
yum install mozilla-nspr mozilla-nss mozilla-nss-devel mozilla-nspr-devel mozilla-devel firefox mozilla

Still the same problem.

I googled for a solution and all I could find was how to make Firefox fonts look less crappy.

Anyone seen this before?
(FC3.91, fully yum'd)

BTW, I had not upgraded anything in the last day other than the kernel, but I had not rebooted when the problem popped up and when I rebooted, i booted off the old kernel.

Just a thought
Edit..Preferences....General...Fonts
You don't have the fonts set to the same color as the background?

I made no changes between when it was working and when it wasn't.

I can't do what you suggested because I can't read anything since there's no text.

I have the same problem as you. No text in either firefox or thunderbird.

I've tried to delete all folders related to firefox and thunderbird and than reinstalled both, but same result. I tried firefox 1.0.4 and 1.0.6, but no success. I'm just getting images and underlines in menus.

Have you managed to solve this problem?

--
Lagren

Hi,

I'm having the same problem.
Starting Thunderbird in console gives me errors about some pango font that is not installed.
Seems to me that this is the problem...
Haven't had the time to try this, but noticed the pango directory on my fedora system.

Regards, Johan den Hollander

Have not found a solution yet.

(Gecko:8126): Pango-CRITICAL **: pango_cairo_show_glyph_string: assertion `PANGO_IS_CAIRO_FONT (font)' failed

This is the errorline I get when starting thunderbird from console window

Has anyone else found a solution yet?

Oops found a workaround:

start thunderbird from console with this command

Works!

Thanks heaps for that workaround, do you know if there is any solution to fix the problem completely...?

I had this problem when I was using Fc4t3 and got all the updates via yum channels.
Maybe it was a testing version of pango or thunderbird / firefox.
I had no problem with firefox (deer park) which should have been an alpha or beta version too.
Now I installed FC4 final and have had no trouble with this yet.

Good to hear, as I'm running Fedora Core 4 test release 3 at the moment, and was soon to install the final FC4 release onto my system.

hi

did anybody found a final solution for this problem?
I use the disable pango option now, but i want it to run with pango
Any ideas?

I ended up just editing /usr/bin/firefox and /usr/bin/thunderbird and uncommenting the following two lines:

MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO

So, not sure what to do to get it running without disabling Pango. I too would be keen to know, as It's been difficult in tracking down a solution.

i hope they build a new RPM that works then

Not a linux related problem, but I've stumbled across the very same mysterious and unexplained error whilst using the Windows version of FireFox 1.0.6, and found this forum while looking for a solution.

To confirm, there was no unexpected behaviour from Firefox other than *ALL* text is now missing from the rendering window - images, buttons and HTML gadgets remain. This behaviour developed between browsing sessions without any good reason as far as I can see, and I can't recall any crash or unexpected close.

I'm really puzzled by this as I'm writing this at 10pm and the actual behaviour change happened about 8pm - and I had been using the browser near-constantly for the last 6 hours. I simply closed the browser after and when it was next opened.... strange things.

I'll look at the fixes posted here and see if I can apply them to this version, but seeing as I'm here I thought I'd just confirm a sighting of this in the Windows version as well as Linux.

Any other ideas?



Tom.