Windows 10 reached EOS (end of support) on October 14, 2025. For more information, see this article.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Firefox freezes on printing pdf documents

  • 10 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 24 views
  • Last reply by Stefan

more options

Hello,

I have today encountered a reproducible issue with Firefox 145.0.2 (64-bit) on my system (CachyOS Linux). Whenever I press the "Print" button in the printing dialog for a PDF file, the browser freezes and no longer reacts to anything. I had to kill the process manually and try again. I have then downloaded the PDF and opened a different application to print it - that worked fine. Is this a known issue with Firefox? Does anyone have an idea how to fix this?

I already tried resetting the printer settings in the browser, but that did not change anything.

Thanks, Stefan

Hello, I have today encountered a reproducible issue with Firefox 145.0.2 (64-bit) on my system (CachyOS Linux). Whenever I press the "Print" button in the printing dialog for a PDF file, the browser freezes and no longer reacts to anything. I had to kill the process manually and try again. I have then downloaded the PDF and opened a different application to print it - that worked fine. Is this a known issue with Firefox? Does anyone have an idea how to fix this? I already tried resetting the printer settings in the browser, but that did not change anything. Thanks, Stefan

All Replies (10)

more options

Hello

Fix printing problems in Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-printing-problems-firefox

For information purposes, another path to print. From Firefox 101, a new preference, print.prefer_system_dialog, was added to print using the system dialog and not the new print preview.

Can the preference, print.prefer_system_dialog, be useful to you.

You can try. 1 - Go to configuration editor for Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox 2 - Enter a search term print.prefer_system_dialog You can double-click on the preference to set the value to true

more options

Agent virtuel said

... Fix printing problems in Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-printing-problems-firefox For information purposes, another path to print. From Firefox 101, a new preference, print.prefer_system_dialog, was added to print using the system dialog and not the new print preview. Can the preference, print.prefer_system_dialog, be useful to you. ...

I already visited the referenced page to fix printing problems. It did not change anything.

The print.prefer_system_dialog even made the issue worse. Instead of showing the print preview when I click on "Print..." Firefox immediately freezes.

more options

Of course, it's not the answer expected, i don’t know what else to tell you.

You can try bugzilla. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi?format=advanced

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla If you wish, you can file a bug report.

Product Firefox. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Firefox

more options

Try downloading Firefox from Mozilla. Download, unzip, and run firefox-bin from the folder and see if you have the same issue. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-release

What Desktop? X11 or Wayland? Does it happen when printing to pdf? What's showing in the logs when firefox goes boom? You can also run a trace to see what's happening when it goes boom. strace -t -o firefox_debug.txt firefox &

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20251127 KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.3 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.20.0 Qt Version: 6.10.1 Kernel Version: 6.17.9-1-default (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 12 × Intel® Core™ i7-9850H CPU @ 2.60GHz Memory: 128 GiB of RAM (125.1 GiB usable) Graphics Processor: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 Manufacturer: HP Product Name: HP ZBook 17 G6

Modified by jonzn4SUSE

more options

Also, what happens with one of these docs? https://www.irs.gov/downloads/irs-pdf

more options

jonzn4SUSE said

What Desktop? X11 or Wayland? Does it happen when printing to pdf? What's showing in the logs when firefox goes boom? You can also run a trace to see what's happening when it goes boom. strace -t -o firefox_debug.txt firefox & Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20251127 KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.3 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.20.0 Qt Version: 6.10.1 Kernel Version: 6.17.9-1-default (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 12 × Intel® Core™ i7-9850H CPU @ 2.60GHz Memory: 128 GiB of RAM (125.1 GiB usable) Graphics Processor: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 Manufacturer: HP Product Name: HP ZBook 17 G6

OS: CachyOS x86_64 Kernel: Linux 6.17.9-2-cachyos DE: KDE Plasma 6.5.3 WM: KWin (Wayland)

Printing to PDF works fine without any issue. I also tried one of the PDF files from your second link and they fail the same on printing attempts.

The strace contained the following lines: 19:41:53 mprotect(0x2bb5db794000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC) = 0 19:41:53 mprotect(0x2bb5db794000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE) = 0 19:41:53 mprotect(0x2bb5db794000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC) = 0 19:41:53 poll([{fd=9, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=21, events=POLLIN}, {fd=41, events=POLLIN}, {fd=181, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}], 5, 0) = 3 ([{fd=16, revents=POLLIN}, {fd=41, revents=POLLIN}, {fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 recvmsg(16, {msg_name=NULL, msg_namelen=0, msg_iov=[{iov_base="L\0\0\0\0\0\f\0>\352\1\0\1\0\0\0\1\0\f\0L\0\0\0", iov_len=272}, {iov_base="", iov_len=3824}], msg_iovlen=2, msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC}, MSG_DONTWAIT|MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC) = 24 19:41:53 recvmsg(16, {msg_namelen=0}, MSG_DONTWAIT|MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC) = -1 EAGAIN (Die Ressource ist zur Zeit nicht verfügbar) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}]) 19:41:53 poll([{fd=181, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=181, revents=POLLIN}])

The last line was repeated until I killed the process... I do not really know what that means. Could this be printer driver related?

more options

Good to hear that those pdfs from the irs also failed. Did you try Firefox from Mozilla? Could you also try the same steps in X11 and not wayland? I'm not dev, but the line that's repeated would need to be investigated.

Modified by jonzn4SUSE

more options

Getting way into the weeds, but this look interesting. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13018981/poll-system-call-timeout

more options

Also try your os and another via usb live stick to see if you have the same issue in x11 and wayland

more options

jonzn4SUSE said

Did you try Firefox from Mozilla?

Could you also try the same steps in X11 and not wayland? I'm not dev, but the line that's repeated would need to be investigated. </blockquote> I did not try "Firefox from Mozilla" yet as I do not expect a different behaviour. Until a few days ago, I never had an issue directly printing from Firefox...

I started an X11 session and it got the same error as Wayland.

jonzn4SUSE said

Getting way into the weeds, but this look interesting. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13018981/poll-system-call-timeout

Thanks! I am a developer and this was a good start to understand the log. I see this in my log: 20:26:26 connect(198, {sa_family=AF_UNIX, sun_path="/run/cups/cups.sock"}, 22) = 0 So I guess the 198 is the file descriptor to "write" to the cups.sock which in turn is the access point to the cups (something that manages printers as far as I understand Linux right now). So that one does not respond as expected to Firefox or Firefox just does not send the correct data/format - the path is actually correct as I can see the given file there. But that is now a really high level theory...

jonzn4SUSE said

Also try your os and another via usb live stick to see if you have the same issue in x11 and wayland

I did not do that, but I am quiet sure it will just work with an older version of CachyOS as it did that for me, too. It did so for me a few days before I ran into this issue :(

Modified by Stefan

Ask a question

You must log in to your account to reply to posts. Please start a new question, if you do not have an account yet.