print.always_print_silent seems to have gone away -- how do we do this now?
Before, configuring a kiosk-style print from within firefox was trivial. It seems that recently (perhaps with quantum?) the about:config adding of "print.always_print_silent" = true causes either firefox to crash, or to have a print-error pop up. Not sure why this feature was removed, but it was certainly helpful. All addons that achieve similar functionality do not seem to be available on quantum (possibly because they were just setting this flag?).
Anyway, not sure what else to do at this point besides switch over to chrome.
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This feature wasn't removed. For what it's worth, I just created and tested the new boolean preference on Windows 7; no crash.
Are you having this problem only with print.always_print_silent = true ? In other words, with the preference flipped to false, printing through the dialog works without error ?
Thanks @jscher2000. I have about 10 systems, most Lubuntu, one running windows, and 2 are windows tablets. They are all being used as kiosks, and I was looking through them all last night (yea - I know... the hardware isn't really under my control, and the hardware is all very old which is why I'm running Lubuntu on most of them). I'm not surprised that there's different behavior on the linux systems since the printer tie-in is likely through an OS abstraction that is probably different. I was able to get varying results between the systems. Some would crash the browser, some would just happily look like they were printing, but did nothing. Some of these printers (they are label printers) are connected directly via usb, some are network-based, and some are network-shared from the computer they are usb-connected to. So, there's a lot of mess going on, and I didn't have time to really catalog off the different behaviors.
The thing that's weird to me is that we have had these setup and kiosk checkin-system printers for several years with the print.always_print_silent, and they have worked just fine. Then, this last week, every single one of them stopped working in some way and I started getting calls. It took me a while to realize that turning this setting to false, or removing it would allow printing to continue, but the users have to click the "print" button now. So, I figured something had changed on them this week for that to be the case.
Any insight? I may try chrome for some of these as I think they also have some kiosk/fullscreen plugins that might work. I had liked firefox because of the ability to configure several things specifically about the printer within the browser as the settings across many OSes is kinda harder to maintain.
Thanks again for any help!
If this started in Firefox 59.0 or 59.0.1, and doesn't affect 58.0.2 (if you reinstall that version as a test), then likely there was a relevant change in Firefox. Possibly something related to printing, or affecting compatibility with an add-on, customization, or device driver.
Do you want to file a bug?