Report id 672549441

samdiener · February 15, 2017

Using Zotero for Firefox on a Mac, with many tabs open. I tried to view the contents of a shared library by clicking on the folder in the left pane. The listing did not appear. Instead, I got the message, "An error has occurred. Please restart Firefox."

samdiener · February 15, 2017

I forgot to say, I'm using version 4.0.29.16

adamsmith · February 15, 2017

Is this a one time error or does it re-occur? If the former, I wouldn't worry about it, especially with a major new version about to be released.

dstillman · February 15, 2017

But for good measure, check your database integrity from the Advanced → Files and Folders pane of the Zotero preferences.

samdiener · February 17, 2017

Thanks, Adam and Dan,
Adam, it's happened 3-4 times in the last week.
Dan, I did check the database integrity, and, to my relief, it passed.
If the next version is really that imminent, it sounds like you are suggesting that it might be best to wait on this and then upgrade at the earliest opportunity?

dstillman · February 17, 2017

it sounds like you are suggesting that it might be best to wait on this and then upgrade at the earliest opportunity?

Yes, that's right. 5.0 is totally rewritten, so any problems with that will be...new problems.

Rintze · February 17, 2017

"5.0 is totally rewritten, so any problems with that will be...new problems."

@dstillman, I think you just found the perfect marketing slogan for Zotero 5.0 :).

samdiener · February 27, 2017

Hello,
I just received the error again. I Quit Firefox. Relaunched Firefox. Opened Zotero. Tried to search zotero for "prejudice" - but only got as far as "prejud" when I received the error again. It is report ID 1438765178. I understand that you're prioritizing trying to finish 5.0, but I'm getting concerned now that the frequency of this error seems to be increasing for me, and Z5 hasn't been released yet.

dstillman · February 27, 2017

We really can't debug 4.0 — there won't be any more 4.0 releases, so even if we found a bug we couldn't fix it — so I'd recommend installing the 5.0 Beta if you're having trouble. It's very unusual to get crashes like this, so it's possible there's a problem that will continue to 5.0, but we can debug this further in that if necessary. (The distinction between Beta and Final is fairly arbitrary this late in the beta period. You can revert to the release version after 5.0 Final comes out.)

If you really don't want to upgrade, my best guess is that temporarily disabling auto-sync would address this.