Every time I upgrade Firefox, it crashed upon starting up. Sometimes even locking up X. Baffled I began to try removing parts of Firefox to see what was going oh so wrong. It turns out when I nuked ~/.mozilla/firefox ... all was well again. In specific, the various extensions I had installed such as ForecastFox, AdBlock, and User Agent Switcher were causing the problem. This was confirmed by running Firefox from command line... where the last message it would spit out before dieing was along the lines of unable to skin (insert extension related file name here). A message needs to be printed out ... preferrably before upgrading... notifying the user that upgrading with extensions can, in effect, hose Firefox... so you should back up your data (i.e. bookmarks) before upgrading. If you crash after upgrading, rm -r -f ~/.mozilla/firefox will fix it, at the cost of all installed themes, extensions, and bookmarks. It's somewhat picky -- but I filed it under critical since this does cause crashes ... sometimes taking X with it. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install firefox 2. Install extensions... I believe "User Agent Switcher" is among the most "nuke" prone. 3. Upgrade firefox 4. Start Firefox Actual Results: 90% of the time FireFox crashed. 10% of the time it took X with it. Expected Results: Loaded my homepage and allowed me to surf. Portage 2.0.51.19 (default-linux/x86/2005.0, gcc-3.3.5-20050130, glibc-2.3.4.20041102-r1, 2.6.11-gentoo-r5 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.11-gentoo-r5 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.4.16 Python: dev-lang/python-2.3.5 [2.3.5 (#1, Apr 28 2005, 01:43:58)] ccache version 2.3 [enabled] dev-lang/python: 2.3.5 sys-apps/sandbox: [Not Present] sys-devel/autoconf: 2.59-r6, 2.13 sys-devel/automake: 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.5, 1.4_p6, 1.6.3, 1.9.4 sys-devel/binutils: 2.15.92.0.2-r7 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.16 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.8.1-r2 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/env /usr/kde/3.3/share/config /usr/kde/3.3/shutdown /usr/kde/3.4/env /usr/kde/3.4/share/config /usr/kde/3.4/shutdown /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs autoconfig ccache distlocks sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="X aac aim alsa apm arts audiofile avi berkdb bitmap-fonts bonobo bzip2 bzlib cdr clamav codecs crypt css cups curl dhcpdirectfb divx4linux dvd dvdr dvdread emboss encode esd ethereal fam ffmpeg flac foomaticdb fortran freetype gdbm gif gimp gimpprint gkrellm gnome gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 gtkhtml icq imagemagick imlib ipv6 ithreads java jpeg junit kde libcaca libclamav libg++ libwww lirc lm_sensors mad mikmod mixer mjpeg mmx motif mozilla mp3 mpeg mplayer msn mysql mythtv ncurses nls nvidia offensive ogg oggvorbis opengl oss pam pcap pdf pdflib perl png python qt quicktime rar readline screenshot sdl silc socks5 spell sse sse2 ssl svga svgz tcpd tetex threads tiff transcode truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts usb userlocales v4l v4l2 vcd vorbis wifi x86 xml xml2 xmms xv xvid yahoo zlib userland_GNU kernel_linux libc_glibc" Unset: ASFLAGS, CBUILD, CTARGET, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY
You don't need to delete your whole ~/.mozilla/firefox to get rid of mozilla extensions.
Nice to see that the version of Firefox is omitted. For me this is not a problem (at least any longer) since Firefox disables all extensions that are not marked to work with that version of firefox (think it has done that since 1.0.5 or so) and I have not in a long time had this problem so is this really a bug still affecting us?
This problem was for early 1.0.x versions. With 1.5 out -- this is no longer an issue.
