Mac OS Q: Why did Mozilla Talkback kill my browsers?

Factual Questions
1

I usually use Safari but every once in a great while I find a site which doesn’t play well. So I fire up Firefox, or maybe Camino. The other day I hit a problematic site which crashed Safari so I tried it with Firefox. Firefox must not have liked it either and started to crash but mid-crash up pops an application called Mozilla Talkback. It’s a nice, friendly easy to use little app which allows you to “talk back” to the Mozilla developers so they can improve it.

“Just click continue to activate Talkback. It’s easy and fun! If you don’t want to right now, click 'cancel.”

There is no “cancel.” There’s only “disable and quit.” I hit “disable and quit.” Now Firefox quits and launches the nice friendly easy to use application Talkback everytime. I tried saying “yes” and activating Talkback. Too late. I must have hurt its feelings because it won’t do anything but crash Firefox and then crash itself.

I tried launching Camino and now Camino crashes, launches Talkback and crashes. I didn’t even go to a ill-behaved website first, unless you consider SDMB an ill-behaving website.

So, I can no longer use Firefox or Camino because the nice friendly easy to use application Talkback has seized control of them and refuses to let them run without running itself and then crashing in a huff.

What up with that?

I suppose I’ll have to delete both programs. Thanks Mozilla Talkback, then I’ll have to migrate all my bookmarks all over again and re-customize each one.

Thank goodness Safari still works.

2

Thought I’d bump this one more time.

I’ve deleted Firefox and Camino, run Diskwarrior, repaired permissions restarted, reinstalled Firefox and it still crashes and throws up “Talkback.” Firefox crashes and quits immediately, Camino crashes and hangs forcing me to force quit from the finder.

Any ideas at all?

3

You might want to try to move the directory /Users/<your home dir>/Library/Application Suppport/Firefox to someplace else, because I suspect there is something really messed up in a cache or configuration file in there.

I say move it rather than delete it, because your bookmarks and things are also in there, and you can get them back out if you need to. It’s not hard, the bookmarks are in a file called “bookmarks.html” in the directory profiles/<some random number>.default/bookmarks.html.

Actually, re-reading, I think you probably already know that.

Ok, I need to finish this post so I can launch Camino, which I haven’t had installed in forever. I want to make sure it also uses the Firefox application support dir.

4

Thanks for that advice. I did as you said, reinstalled Firefox again, and now it works. I’ll have to try doing the same thing with Camino and see how that works.