Comment 2 for bug 338785

I believe this bug is triggered by upgrading Firefox when it is running. I installed Fedora Linux 9, which includes Firefox 3.0b5, and started Firefox and opened some tabs and web pages. Then I ran the Fedora 'yum update' command which upgraded Firefox to 3.0 using the rpm package system. After that, trying to use Firefox kept triggering assertion failures when entering text in the search box or switching between tabs. The assertion failures are similar to that at the top of this bug report. Here are two of them:

ASSERT: *** Search: _installLocation: engine has no file!
Stack Trace:
0:ENSURE_WARN(false,_installLocation: engine has no file!,2147500037)
1:()
2:()
3:()
4:epsGetAttr([object Object],alias)
5:()
6:SRCH_SVC_getEngineByAlias(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=445158)
7:getEngineByAlias(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=445158)
8:getShortcutOrURI(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=445158,[object Object])
9:canonizeUrl([object KeyboardEvent],[object Object])
10:handleURLBarCommand([object KeyboardEvent])
11:anonymous(textentered,[object KeyboardEvent])
12:fireEvent(textentered,[object KeyboardEvent])
13:onTextEntered()
14:handleEnter(false)
15:onKeyPress([object KeyboardEvent])
16:onxblkeypress([object KeyboardEvent])

ASSERT: *** Search: _installLocation: engine has no file!
Stack Trace:
0:ENSURE_WARN(false,_installLocation: engine has no file!,2147500037)
1:()
2:()
3:()
4:epsGetAttr([object Object],hidden)
5:()
6:()
7:currentEngine()
8:get_currentEngine()
9:doSearch(firefox bugzilla,current)
10:handleSearchCommand([object KeyboardEvent])
11:onTextEntered()
12:handleEnter(false)
13:onKeyPress([object KeyboardEvent])
14:onxblkeypress([object KeyboardEvent])

The only addons I have installed are the various language packs that ship with Fedora Linux 9.

It appears from the message that some file Firefox uses has been removed as part of the upgrade. If this is the case, then perhaps assertion failures should not be used as the mechanism to report missing files (after all a file can go away for all sorts of reasons, and an assertion failure indicates a completely 'impossible' condition). Instead if a file is missing the user could be prompted to restart Firefox.