More Firefox problems

Anyone else having Firefox difficulties? Latest Firefox 18.0.1 out this week seems to be causing problems. On startup it totally froze my wife's computer (HP, W7, everything up to date) to the extent that even task manager would not work, had to switch off and reboot

Everything else including Thunderbird worked fine. Looked up FF forum on my own computer and found various remedies including reset, none works because FF crashes the machine as soon as I click the help menu to reset. Eventually deleted her profile and created new one but all data inc bookmarks has been lost although it was supposed to be kept.

modern FF is like russion roullete, can be changes that create havoc and have to hope for the best.

one such change is the removal of the ability to disable keepalive which can have some bad negative effects. Wasnt impressed how the decision was made to remove it, basically a dev on a whim who wanted the option removed made a patch, and it quickly got integrated into the app, there was little public discussion on that change, it just happened.

the typical fix they love to dish out is reset your profile (in other words making you configure it all again), when that doesnt work they either give up or start blaming the end user or the end user's pc.

Have you tried running Firefox in safe-mode? (hold down 'shift' while executing firefox shortcut)

do you run any add-ons at all?- safe mode runs firefox with all add-ons disabled

you may have a corrupt add-on or corrupt firefox install, you could try re-installing it.

if it works in safe mode then one of your add-ons could be the cause, try turning them on 1 by 1 until you find the culprit.

there is an add-on called Xmarks you can use to keep all your bookmarks on a cloud server, you can install it on most browsers on all your computers and your bookmarks will be synchronized across them all

good luck

In reply to a post by paulb100:

there is an add-on called Xmarks you can use to keep all your bookmarks on a cloud server, you can install it on most browsers on all your computers and your bookmarks will be synchronized across them all

Modern versions of Firefox have Firefox Sync built in, which allows you to keep bookmarks, saved passwords and other data synchronised between Firefox installations, including Firefox on Android.

In reply to a post by David_W:

In reply to a post by paulb100:

there is an add-on called Xmarks you can use to keep all your bookmarks on a cloud server, you can install it on most browsers on all your computers and your bookmarks will be synchronized across them all

Modern versions of Firefox have Firefox Sync built in, which allows you to keep bookmarks, saved passwords and other data synchronised between Firefox installations, including Firefox on Android.

that is true...however Xmarks sync allows you to sync across multiple browser platforms, what bookmarks you have in Firefox you can have in Opera or Chrome, I should of mentioned firefox sync though...TBH I found it very difficult too setup with other devices, Android Firefox with Desktop Firefox was extremely difficult and I had too take too google and found many others with the same problem.

Thanks everyone for your comments. I tried various fixes fm Mozilla Support including safe mode but none worked because FF froze the whole computer as soon as I clicked on menu after opening. First time I have found task manager would not work.

The problem must have been the profile which was changed in some way. No problems (yet) after setting up a new one. Non-techie so haven't a clue what synch means beyond that it probably spells more trouble and aggro -- FF on one machine is bad enough. I run it simply because I don't like Google's snooping. I tried BT smartphone working via wifi until I found the app must be downloaded via Google Shop which in turn requires registration with all Google's crosslinking ... no thanks.

Edited by Malwaremike (Wed 23-Jan-13 10:17:24)

"Sync" in this context means to keep data such as address lists identical in more than one location when one changes.

An example - I have Dropbox running on two computers and on my Android mobile. As soon as I take a photo on my phone, it gets automatically uploaded to my Dropbox web storage, and from there automatically downloaded to both computers.

I have a huge number of photos on my computer, from long before Dropbox existed. If I copy one to the Dropbox folder on the computer, it rapidly gets to my web storage and to the other computer and my phone.

The four storage places are kept in sync .