Skip to content

TBA Alpha and Nightly cannot be debugged with about:debugging

Debugging TBA has always been hard... now it's close to impossible with Alpha and Nightly 😒.

The inspector refuses to connect to TBA and I got this error in the console:

[ACTION FAILED] CONNECT_RUNTIME_FAILURE: Protocol error (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED): Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIStringBundle.GetStringFromName] from: server0.conn4.deviceActor3 (resource://devtools/shared/system.js:3:0)

Seeing that it's a string problem, I realized that maybe there's something wrong with the channel, and it seems to be the right call, as I managed to connect to a 14.0.4 release build.

So, there are two possibilities:

  1. alpha/nightly have a problematic channel name
  2. we added some patch during 14.5 which broke the connection to Firefox's inspector.
To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information