Print Preview hangs information

b333406

Hello,

So I am experiencing the print preview spooling hanging issue that some other people have reported.

I have made a few observations. So IT recently switched our print servers and those printers have been removed from my printer settings. for whatever reason 3 of the old printers on the old print server are still in the Vivaldi print dialog. if you wait for like 5 minutes the print preview will eventually become responsive and you can print. It is like it has to wait for the printers to time out.

So, where is vivaldi pulling printer info from? is there a way to delete these old printers? I deleted my cache and it did not help.

specs,

Vivaldi 3.7.2218.52 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
Revision a466b7f17805f4e7b50302de5efa2a46eb62ba13
OS Windows 10 OS Version 1909 (Build 18363.1377)
JavaScript V8 8.9.255.24
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.116 Safari/537.36
Command Line "C:\Users\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe" --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --origin-trial-disabled-features=SecurePaymentConfirmation --save-page-as-mhtml
Executable Path C:\Users\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe
Profile Path C:\Users\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\User Data\Default

Pathduck

@b333406 Hello, and Welcome to the Vivaldi Community

I think this will be difficult to reproduce for anyone else. I don't even have a printer, so I just have Print to PDF available.

I quick search found these, so you're not the only one:
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/thread/5876676?hl=en
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eo8yu7/remove_old_printer_connections_from_chrome/

Apparently the printers are saved in the Preferences file, it's a JSON format file, and from a quick look printers are stored in the printing node. You could in theory delete the node but I wouldn't recommend it unless you have the right tool and know how to use it. Here's one:
https://tomeko.net/software/JSONedit/

Another solution would be to go to a new clean profile of course, but that seems excessive just to remove old printer entries.

Wish I had a better answer. More proof of Chromium braindead implementations of certain things.

b333406

@Pathduck so sorry if I have posted the same thing a million times to you. for some reason it wont come up. I apparently have no idea how to reply or make another post

b333406

@Pathduck

Ok, awesome.

So...that was awful. I used vs code at first to try and view the json and it turns out the object for the print preview settings is just a giant string in the appState. So no fancy json viewer worked for me.

so I pulled the whole string into notepad ++ and looked through the recent destinations list. within that list were the 2 old printers as objects in there. I carefully (CAREFULLY) selected each object between the bracket referencing the old printers that were offline and deleted them. The in used the Tomeko json edit to change jus the value since other programs I had were reformatting stuff.

and voila! no more old printers and the print preview works lightning fast once again. No more hanging and crashing.

somethings to note. There was a preferences under default and under snapshot. when I edited the default and closed vivadi it seems the snapshot overrode it. then when I tried to edit the snapshot it disappeared on me and left only the default. finally after editing the default and restarting it worked.

So. after this semi long journey my process was this. If you are having print preview hanging and waiting forever errors my advice is this. wait it out once. it may take 5 or 10 min to time out but when it does, inspect the printers. If you see an old printer or possibly someone elses lan printer at say school or a different usb printer I am thinking vivaldi is looking for those printers and is waiting for the time out. thats the hang and lag. So, pull you json preferences and clean out the printers you don't need. It doesn't seem to take them from the print system dialog.

worked for me. I have 2 other computers here doing the same so I will try this fix with them and report back.

Thanks.

Pathduck

@b333406 Hi, what I meant was that there are other people out there with the same issue, not that I have seen the same issue here for Vivaldi lots of times.

Like I said it's probably hard for others to reproduce and not easy to remove the old printers without trying a completely new profile.

One advice from one of those other threads is to delete the file Preferences but this will also clear out lots of Vivaldi's settings.

I could help you figure out how to edit the Preferences directly if that's something you're willing to do.

Pathduck

Oh, I see you've already fixed it on your own, well done

One thing: Never ever edit the config files while Vivaldi is running, that likely caused the weird behaviour. And always make a backup first. I should've made that explicit in my post

Editing JSON directly is finnicky and to avoid messing things up I would just use JSONedit to delete the whole appState node under Printing and hopefully the printer list including Print to PDF will be rebuilt.

b333406

@Pathduck

makes sense, it was just open and I didn't think about it.

I made 2 backups before I started....you know for reasons....just in case.

good news is that fixed everything. So I wonder if this is the behavior everyone is complaining about? I found a few different instances of people having this issue. I absolutely get it, super hard to reproduce. We had one computer do it and kinda forgot about it and just printed with different browsers. Now that it hit my daily driver I had to fix it.

Hopefully it will help some people out and shine some light on the situation.

thanks again

b333406

@Gwen-Dragon it only tried to find printers that I have printed to in the past. All the printers were in the drop down not the system browser for printers. They didn't show up there.

in the preferences I looked at the appState under printing > print_preview_sticky_settings.

the old printers were stored under recentDestinations. So my guess is that when you print, the printer is stored here under recent destinations for ease of future selection of which printer you want to use regardless of system print settings (I guess?) so when you open the print preview it tries to hit those and you have to wait for the connection to time out.

so you can add and subtract printers till your heart is content, but if you print to say a library printer directly from the browser, it may save that printer under recent destinations and call out to it every time you call print preview.

There were 2 old printers on a different print server in the drop down for me and their correcponding info was in the recentDestinations even though I had removed them from my print system settings. Once I removed them from the appState in preferences everything is working peachy!

b333406

@Gwen-Dragon Its entirely possible, our IT department is comprised of idiots. we have about 92 different printers and we manually hook into other people network printers from time to time. I printed from vivaldi and for some reason the old printers that were still online always just hung out in the destination drop down box (not the see more option).

It never used to be a problem till those printers were taken offline. The print server is still up and running but none of the printers are connected. you can connect to it. but they are offline. it doesn't seem to bother windows. but vivaldi is super pissed at it.

b333406

@Gwen-Dragon well never mind. I reconnected to the old dead printer and tried to print to it and the print preview is still working. although even after removing the printer from my windows settings the printer still shows up in vivaldi recent destinations.

b333406

@Gwen-Dragon They are awful. not your fault. Its a special sticky kind of situation. I would trade them all for a nice house plant. Just to give you a taste they regularly write down server passwords on post it notes and then throw them away. Then when we need in to a server 6 months later, no one knows the admin credentials.

I tried a few more things and connecting to the old printer for my office. The connection/install alone for the drivers or whatever it is pulling in took about 2 - 3 minutes.

I guess my thoughts are that its likely the drivers or whatever are messed up on specific machines on the old print server and it causes a long connection time. Since they are no longer on my machine as printers it has to pull them every time it connects. and vivaldi bing as nice as it is remembers the old printer configurations. But when those printers got sidelined i removed them and vivaldi tries to connect to those old printers forcing a reinstall/connection of the old drivers which takes forever.

Does that make sense?

b333406

@Gwen-Dragon its fine, pretty common happenings in my experience. rant over :face_with_stuck-out_tongue:

Thanks again to everyone who helped. Hopefully this will help someone else out in the future.

b333406

@Gwen-Dragon Oh I will. I'm a HUGE fan of Vivaldi. I was a big fan of opera back in the day. Until Jon von Tetzchner and opera parted ways. I was extremely excited for his new product release. I think I swapped full time to vivaldi around 0.8 or so and haven't looked back!

Keep up the amazing work!