Firefox Not Responding Error for Links from Zotero

SLFretwell · June 24, 2022

I can not open any websites from Zotero in my default browser, Firefox, on Windows 10 using Zotero 6. URL fields, links within PDFs browsed in the built-in viewer, as well as links under the "Locate" Menu for a given Item (e.g. "View Online") produce a warning that the existing Firefox process is not responding and must be closed to "open a new window". The existing process is not frozen and I can open links from other locations (e.g. PDFs viewed in Adobe Acrobat).

I have tried opening Firefox in Troubleshoot Mode, but still get the issue. Can anyone reproduce this? Firefox 101.0.1, Windows 10, Zotero 6.0.8

dstillman · June 24, 2022

Restart your computer and try again. Zotero just launches URLs via the system in your default browser. It doesn't have any control over what happens after that.

SLFretwell · July 6, 2022

I would believe that were it not Firefox specific. Other browsers, when set as default, work fine (tested with Chrome and Edge). However, Firefox gives this error. Could it be related to the fact that Zotero and Firefox seem to use the same backend? I know no other way to explain what I mean by backend other than Firefox and Zotero share some styles/prompts/behaviors (like how Zotero's config editor is the same `about:config` as Firefox).

If someone more web savvy could help me reproduce this, I'd happily elevate it to a Firefox issue report, but as it stands I have no technical sense for what the problem could be...

dstillman · July 6, 2022

Believe what? I wrote the code in question, and I'm telling you that all Zotero does is launch the URL via the OS. You can see the code for yourself if you don't believe me:

https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/0357026865e52fee4514e2e1b7f86167d0f3d782/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/zotero.js#L1054-L1059

You can confirm from Help → Debug Output Logging → View Output that it's not going into the catch block, which would log "launchWithURI() not supported -- trying fallback executable". But unless you've changed fallbackLauncher.windows, it wouldn't be, because that setting is blank by default on Windows, so it would just throw an error and not even try to launch anything.

I just tested with Firefox 102 on Windows 10 and it works perfectly fine. Beyond that, Zotero has millions of users, and we'd obviously know if there were some general issue with opening links on Windows with Firefox set as the default browser. So this is something specific to your system that you'll need to debug.