Epiphany fails to start with a "drawable is not a pixmap or window" error

do you try to recover from a previous crash? that would mean you will crash again as it opens the same crashy page. Is it a specific page? If so, which one?

Even when I don't recover, the crash persists (see the attached video).

I'm getting this error as well.

what video driver are you using? can you try to use a free driver rather than nvidia (e.g. nv)?

I tried with the vesa driver and the error persists. The error seems to be implying that a window is being used before it is fully realized. It's hard to deduce anything more from the error message. It doesn't make a difference if I recover or not.

As a workaround, by deleting all the "session_gnome*" files in ~/.gnome2/epiphany, I got epiphany to start. My session is gone, but at least now it runs again.

Jose'
I followed your advice, but my epiphany still crashed in the same manner.
Then I deleted session-crashed.xml, and it worked for a little while, and then it crashed again.

Then it obviously remains a bug. I remember writing a small app using gktmm and experiencing a similar bug recently. In my case it was related to attempting to use a window that was not fully realized. Maybe the upstream developers can be made aware of this so that they could possibly debug it.

I have a similar (more or less identical, actually) problem on Debian/sid (with many different combinations of webkit and epiphany, including several git revisions). Specifically removing session-crashed.xml works around it (this is undesirable in many cases though). Reproduceable on both ATi Catalyst and the free drivers.

Interesting thing about this one, breaking on gdk_x_error is ineffective (with or without --sync command line). Don't know if that's something peculiar at my end or not.

Alright, seeing as how I couldn't get a backtrace on gdk_x_error I've done as best I can and instead put a break in at the GDK Warning immediately before hand. If I step through from this point the BadWindow error is raised as soon as gdk_x11_drawable_get_xid return. Backtrace:

Breakpoint 2, IA__gdk_x11_drawable_get_xid (drawable=0x0)
    at /tmp/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.2/gdk/x11/gdkdrawable-x11.c:952
952 /tmp/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.2/gdk/x11/gdkdrawable-x11.c: No such file or directory.
 in /tmp/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.2/gdk/x11/gdkdrawable-x11.c
(gdb) bt
#0 IA__gdk_x11_drawable_get_xid (drawable=0x0)
    at /tmp/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.2/gdk/x11/gdkdrawable-x11.c:952
#1 0x00007fffe83f4b15 in window_is_xembed () at canberra-gtk-module.c:371
#2 dispatch_sound_event () at canberra-gtk-module.c:436
#3 dispatch_queue () at canberra-gtk-module.c:794
#4 0x00007fffe83f51d3 in idle_cb (userdata=0x0) at canberra-gtk-module.c:802
#5 0x00007ffff495a847 in gdk_threads_dispatch (data=0x81f100)
    at /tmp/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.2/gdk/gdk.c:506
#6 0x00007ffff1e7512a in g_main_context_dispatch () from /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#7 0x00007ffff1e78988 in ?? () from /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#8 0x00007ffff1e78e5d in g_main_loop_run () from /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#9 0x00007ffff4d24c07 in IA__gtk_main ()
    at /tmp/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.2/gtk/gtkmain.c:1216
#10 0x0000000000432ca4 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffffffe918) at ephy-main.c:782

Could be insufficient checking in libcanberra?

Apologies for the bug spam.

I can work around the issue by doing an ‘apt-get remove libcanberra-gtk-module’ – I'm currently investigating the offending procedure in that library; Will file a bug upstream when I find something.

José and/or Taylor, can you confirm whether removing libcanberra-gtk-module "fixes" it for you?

Cheers.

I can confirm that it allows epiphany to startup fine. This bug reappeared after I had worked around it and without the libcanberra-gtk-module package it does indeed start up. The following warning is generated but it looks like it's because I started epiphany with the package installed to confirm that I got the 'Bad Window' error (which I did) and then uninstalled the package to then run epiphany which did start up:

Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The module warning is harmless, just means you won't be getting any sound events from libcanberra.

Well I produced a fix for the problem, then checked libcanberra git, where I discovered that filing a bug on it is pointless, as this has already been fixed upstream.
See: http://git.0pointer.de/?p=libcanberra.git;a=commit;h=ed6f221e617537b1901211d41c0bd8018739e814

(To clarify: that's not my fix, it was just there when I double checked before filing)

Yes. They were doing the same thing I did in the small app I mentioned that caused it to crash.

fix committed upstream.

This bug was fixed in the package libcanberra - 0.15-0ubuntu7

---------------
libcanberra (0.15-0ubuntu7) karmic; urgency=low

  * 0017-gtk-verify-that-a-widget-is-realized-before-we-try-t.patch: Pull
    from upstream git head. (LP: #438463)

 -- Luke Yelavich <email address hidden> Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:58:18 +1100