Stupid Firefox

In My Humble Opinion
1

All right, baseline stuff first. I’ve never been one for brand loyalty, and as far as I’m concerned, web-browsing platforms are largely interchangable. I started with Internet Explorer largely because that’s what there was at a time, then eventually switched to Chrome because it was more reliable (IIRC).

So a little later Firefox comes along, and although I’ve long forgotten what I found about it that was better than Chrome (this may have been the time I mistakenly deleted my Google account…it was a confusing time), I switched to it and largely forgot about Chrome. For a long time it was highly reliable. Oh, sure it’d crash if it picked up the wrong thing, but it’d reload everything right back up, no trouble. My only real beef was that every time it loaded the library it got pushed to the far right tab, and that wasn’t much.

So this morning I have a whole bunch of stuff running, and I get the familiar unresponsiveness that heralds a crash. No prob; shut it down, load it back up, same as always. I load it up, and it says it’s updating. No prob; web browsers are a continual work in progress. It finishes updating. I load it up again…

…and it won’t load. I get a window saying that there’s something wrong with the file and it won’t load. No explanation, no recommended course of action, nothing. I restarted the computer, hoping that would fix it…and it didn’t. File won’t load. So I uninstall and reinstall completely from scratch…and Firefox still won’t run.

Allow me to spell it out for you: A program which has been running flawlessly for years (and still runs just fine on another computer I tested it on) stopped running forever on my computer, JUST LIKE THAT, FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON WHATSOEVER, AT A COMPLETELY RANDOM DAY AND TIME. As you can imagine, this seriously ticked me off, and not just because I’d have to spend a lot of time rebuilding my bookmark list (most of them were YouTube videos anyway; I’ll pick them up again soon enough). Shouldn’t we be past the point where instant horrific, total catastrophic system failure can happen? Where computers where these frightening, bewildering alien machines that crashed and failed and melted down at the drop of a pin?

Huh…guess I’m a Chrome man now. There are worse things, I guess.

Seriously, though, anyone have any idea what the hell happened?

2

Happened to me a few days ago, and I miss my Firefox.
Firefox ran an update and POOF! It no longer opens.

I hate HATE** HATE!** Chrome.

Hate it!

I worked on it for three days and gave up.
I have resigned myself to the hell that is chrome.
My online experience is no longer enjoyable.

If you figure it out, let me know how you did it.

Please.

3

Probably the lock file in your profile is still set, due to a bad shutdown of Firefox. Just Google Firefox lock file.

Or, if you really want Chrome, import your Firefox bookmarks. There should be an option to import bookmarks in the bookmark manger.

4

Firefox is 6 years older than Chrome.

5

Roll the system back a week and tell it not to update.

Firefox updated on my main system, and it now likes 640 x 480. I may need the Hubble repair kit for glasses, but that is a bit much on a 27" display.

6

Your bookmarks are still there on your hard drive. Just import them into another browser if you don’t like firefox.

7

Pale Moon ??

8

BTW, these are really the types of questions you should be asking at a Firefox support forum. They can follow you all the way and help you out.

I can tell you this–if reinstalling even old Firefox doesn’t help, then the problem HAS to be with your profile.

Also, I can tell you that you can start Firefox in Safe mode by holding down shift as or right after you open the program.

Anything else, and I’d need to see the exact error message. But, again, it’d probably better to do that with Firefox experts, not here.

9

I’d love to switch to Pale Moon, but I can’t find it or the equivalent for Mac.

10

There’s a Mac version, but it’s not made by the original team and I can’t comment on quality: Pale Moon 27.0.3 - Pale Moon forum

11

I gave up on Firefox years ago. I replaced it with Opera (on a Windows 10 PC) which is pretty good.

12

The best strategy is to have two browsers always available: I have Chrome and Pale Moon (Firefox fork).

13

I wish. Firefox 52 won’t run with java so we’re told to roll back to 51.0.1 and set it to not update. It chooses to update on its own. Can you confirm what you use to “tell it not to update”? We’ve done

Tools > Options > Advanced > Update > Never check for updates

14

I don’t really care for Chrome, but FF has been giving me a lot of problems for the past year or 3. Mostly that it’s a memory hog (it’s using about a half a gig right now with 3 boring tabs open), and a few times a day it’ll grind my computer to a halt. The other reason is that about once a week, each time I click on something it goes ‘unresponsive’ for about a minute. Killing it and reopning it usually helps these issues, but not always. More often then not, it’s just a matter of waiting them out, usually using Chrome while doing so.
I should also mention that this happens on two different computers, one at work, one at home and the home computer is a laptop that’s less than a year old.

These things also seem to be difficult to troubleshoot since people that complain about it being a memory hog also seem to not see an issue with have 30 or 40 tabs open. Or that my problems didn’t just start, they’ve been on going, so I can’t pin it on a specific update or a setting that may have changed. Also, I really don’t have any add-ons to speak of. A few basic ones, but some of the people that are having similar issues have tons.

15

Chrome has a reputation for being a memory hog, too.

You can refresh your FF, which may help. It will remove all your addons but (probably) keep all your tabs and such.

I also found that Flash was causing the biggest problems. Tools > Add-ons > Plugins tab, and make sure Flash isn’t “Always Activate.”

16

Is anybody using Microsoft Edge?

Anybody?

Bueller?

17

I tried using Edge. I like the “reader mode” but I hate that you can’t right-click-and-search. They’d rather you use Cortana. Fail.