Blank Web Pages With Firefox- why?

June 14, 2005 12:57 PM

Why is Firefox drawing blank pages?

I'm on a WinXP machine. I've been using Firefox for a while, and I like it, but sometimes when I start it, it shows a blank page. I can't enter an URL. All buttons seem dead except the close button. Why? WHYYYYYYY????

posted by dogwelder to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Have you tried disabling extensions?
posted by stx23 at 1:38 PM on June 14, 2005

Actually, yeah. Maybe I should get a mac.
posted by dogwelder at 2:12 PM on June 14, 2005

Have you upgraded the browser recently?

If disabling extensions doesn't do it, you could try creating a new browser profile and seeing if it happens there. There could be a problem with your profile. (The command line switch for invoking the Profile Manager in Firefox, which allows you to create/delete/rename profiles, is "-profilemanager")

How often is this occurring?
posted by Kosh at 2:25 PM on June 14, 2005

I've seen this kind of thing happen with bad profiles (as Kosh suggests) and bad themes.
posted by boo_radley at 2:36 PM on June 14, 2005

This happened to me over the last couple of weeks and I finally fixed it yesterday with help from http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup this document. Basically it involved trashing my profile, creating a new profile and then copying back the data (bookmarks.html, cookies.txt etc) piece by piece until my browser was back to normal. I love Firefox, but this problem was definitely a pain to fix.
posted by y10k at 3:14 PM on June 14, 2005

Does your 'update' button move directly to the right of the bookmarks bar? If so, this has been happening to me on three different machines - an iBook, and eMac and a WinXP PC. It seems like I have to start Firefox three times before it works and is driving me crazy! I switched to Safari on the macs and that has helped me cope a little, though I miss extensions desperately. I'm going to try the profile trashing later - man, I hope it works.
posted by dual_action at 3:57 PM on June 14, 2005

Try unchecking Tools-Options-Web Features-Load Images-for the originating website only
posted by ptm at 7:14 PM on June 14, 2005