Firefox 0.9 on OS X 10.2.8 keeps crashing.

June 17, 2004 5:34 PM

Firefox on OS X keeps crashing...help! (more inside)

Firefox 0.9 won't launch on my girlfriend's iBook. She's running 10.2.8, with all the most recent patches. She downloads the file, puts it in her applications folder, and when she launches it, it attempts to launch and is unable to finish launching, and then, instead of stopping, it gets stuck in a loop where rebooting is the only thing that stops it.

The kicker is that I'm running 10.2.8 on a slightly older and slower iBook (mine's a 700mhz and hers is a 800mhz, I believe) and the loop thing happened once to me, and then it launched successfully and I've had no problem since.

What gives? A bit of research on Google shows that it may be the extensions which are causing the problem, but I don't even know where to start with that.

posted by eilatan to computers & internet (14 comments total)

I tried Firefox 0.9 earlier today, noticed it freaking out on many sites that worked fine in 0.8. I've seen others online complaining about it. I do not think it's quite fully baked. I went back to 0.8 for now.
posted by kokogiak at 5:39 PM on June 17, 2004

Oh yeah - this was Firefox 0.9 on Win2k, not Mac.
posted by kokogiak at 5:40 PM on June 17, 2004

You could try repairing permissions in Disk Utility.

And maybe see if anyone in Apple's support forums is having similar issues.

You could also try Camino, which is another very robust and OS X-y mozilla-based.
posted by bcwinters at 5:58 PM on June 17, 2004

eilatan -- I had exactly the same problem after installing Firefox 0.9 yesterday. A quick tour of the MozillaZine discussion board didn't turn up anything useful. I think reverting to 0.8 is the answer for now.
posted by macrone at 6:07 PM on June 17, 2004

Kokogiak, I just had a similar problem today. Try going to

/documents and settings/ --your user name here-- / Application Data / Mozilla

and deleting the Firefox folder (path might be different for you, my system is winXP). Then reinstall 9. I lost my bookmarks in the process, but everything works now.
posted by 4easypayments at 6:32 PM on June 17, 2004

Agh, no... please! I'd soooo hoped that Firefox .9 would be much better than .8. In general, 10.2.8, Camino .7, Firefox .8, Safari 1.whatever, and IE 5.2 have brought me to a new level of browser hell. Camino crashes if I try to bookmark something, and often chokes of forms using "onsubmit". Periodically, Firefox decides that it will leave a dialog box/sheet up on the page no mater what I click, or refuse to acknowledge a URL entered into a second browser window. Safari explodes on random pages. IE 5.2 is just slow as molasses.

I say this as a man who loves Macs: sheesh.
posted by weston at 6:41 PM on June 17, 2004

Ah, I'm glad I was not alone. I had the same problem on OS X 10.3.2.

What I did was to de-install it, reinstall Firefox .9 and then restart, and then all was ok.

On my Win 2K and XP boxes, no problems whatsoever.

Firefox .9 rawks!
posted by gen at 6:57 PM on June 17, 2004

I agree with weston. Sometime about a year ago we'd reached a plateau of niceness in browserville -- everything pretty much worked nicely, Safari was fastest and prettiest and life was sweet.

Yet, upgrade after upgrade came and now there seems to be no one perfect browser. FWIW, Firefox .9 not only does that stupid loop on startup thing, it also has a hideous Windows-esque interface and seems slower than 0.8.

I had the endlessly respawning problem too, and only managed to stop it by going into activity monitor, doing a search for "firefox" (so it wouldn't keep moving as it quit and respawned) then killing it.

It then launched fine second time round. I think the problem was that I was trying to launch it from the disk image, which is read-only.
posted by bonaldi at 7:01 PM on June 17, 2004

Well, the weird thing is that it works just fine on my 10.2.8 iBook, but not on hers.

It seems to be a moot point, though, as Mozilla is working fine for her, so she's going with that for the moment. Silly gmail doesn't work with Safari 1.0 or IE 5.2, which is supremely frustrating. And I'm not going to upgrade my OS just so I can use gmail, you know?
posted by eilatan at 7:06 PM on June 17, 2004

4easy

You (and eilatan) could have saved the bookmarks.

One determination test on the Mac - is to create a "blank" clean user - so you can test to see if it's a preference that is a problem.

I keep a clean user, empty, just in case.
posted by filmgeek at 7:10 PM on June 17, 2004

I did the same as bonaldi. Worked for me.
posted by adamrice at 9:03 PM on June 17, 2004

The startup problems seems to be cross-platform--I had the same problems in XP, and on searching for an answer, found that many other folks had seen it on various platforms.

The basic problem seems to be installing over an older version, where it attempts to load stuff out of your profile that doesn't work any more. Going into the relevant folder and deleting the profile folder (you can save the "bookmarks.html" file) worked fine for me.

For the Mac, the "Firefox 0.9 Install" page says:
Open the Library folder in your Home folder, and remove the Firefox folder. (~/Library/Firefox/).
posted by LairBob at 9:35 PM on June 17, 2004

No problems with Firefox at all on 10.3.4 or Windows 2000 Pro. .9 launches faster and feels faster to work with.
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:11 AM on June 18, 2004

LairBob: I did delete all my preferences -- although they were stored in a Phoenix folder, not a Firefox folder. Still got the looping startup problem. And I wasn't running it from a disk image. And I'd unistalled and reinstalled several times.

I just went back to 0.8. It's fine.
posted by macrone at 3:34 PM on June 18, 2004