Firefox Add-ons: Gmail Notifier + Firebug incompatibilities
For a couple of months now I’ve been getting these random and undecipherable errors in Firebug every couple of minutes. On occasions I might get one or two of these queued up in the console and other times quite a few (10-ish). The error usually goes something like this:
[Exception... "'Component does not have requested interface' when calling method: [nsIInterfaceRequestor::getInterface]" nsresult: "0x80004002 (NS_NOINTERFACE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://firebug/content/net.js :: getRequestWebProgress :: line 1548" data: no]
[Break on this error] return request.notificationCallbacks.getInterface(nsIWebProgress);
net.js (line 1548)Clicking on the “net.js” file (which is usually linked in Firebug, so you can go straight to the source of the issue) shows me some of the internal JavaScript for firebug and a breakpoint where the error occured. Reading through the code I can see that it’s part of Firebug’s internal system for tracking XmlHttpRequest’s on a page, as it can give you a whole bunch of useful data for debugging XHR’s. Unfortunately, the error doesn’t give me any information about which request it has broken on, which makes it hard to guess how I can fix the problem.
Luckily (and ironically unlucky) for me, this has gone on for long enough to hint that it’s not a page causing the issue, but rather an add-on (which use JavaScript/XHR as well). Now, I’m aware that firebug is still a young (1.0) add-on, but it is a bit of a strange error to be getting so frequently, so I hardly think it’s caused by Firebug alone.
Well, today it finally got to me and I went on the rampage to track down this ugly foe that has been destroying my ability to debug pages effectively. After fiddling around with add-on’s for 15 minutes or so I finally figured our that the culprit was Gmail Notifier! This totally makes sense, as I have it set to check my mailbox every minute or so and obviously it has a bug in it somewhere.
To counter my lost add-on, I simply downloaded Google’s Gmail Notifier for the system-tray and all is well in James-land once more. YAY! :) So, if you also use the Gmail notifier add-on alongside Firebug, I hope my solution helps you.
