Freaking out Firefox

October 20, 2006 10:04 AM

My Firefox (v: 1.5.0.7) is freaking out.

Some sites are not loading at all, some are loading funny (Example: Screenshot
HERE)
Some load just fine. Everything in Explorer (yuk) works fine.

I can honestly say I did nothing different like adding programs or changing settings. Just when i started up this morning it was doing this. I'd rather not have to reinstall Firefox unless i can preserve all the settings (extensions, passwords, bookmarks...)

Sorry for the disjointed question :-)

Help!

posted by sandra_s to computers & internet (4 comments total)

That screenshot looks like the stylesheet didn't load for Fark. What that means is anyone's guess.

Start Firefox in Safe mode from your start menu and see if that makes the problem go away. If so, you've got a b0rked profile.

You can create a new profile by going to start>Run and typing "firefox -p". Then, you can copy over the important files, like your bookmarks and passwords from one profile folder to the other. You will have to reinstall any extensions though.
posted by chrisamiller at 10:08 AM on October 20, 2006

FF used to continually resize all the frames (or something similar) so the effect was page seizure. I just reinstalled it and it's been cool.

You can totally export all your settings ... Here's athread wherein everyone argues over the "best" method. Usually I do nothing and when I reinstall all my bookmarks are there. It is probably optional to delete everything in the firefox folder versus just the .exe
posted by shownomercy at 10:09 AM on October 20, 2006

If you do have to delete firefox and do a reinstall here's a tool to back up all your bookmarks, extentions, cookies, history etc making the reinstall process faaar less painful.
posted by squeak at 10:18 AM on October 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

I'd recommend against backing up extensions. Awry extensions are generally what cause these kinds of problems. Everything else can, and should, be transferred over, though.
posted by chrisamiller at 12:57 PM on October 20, 2006