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Friday, February 19, 2010

Firefox add-on/extension woes -- Corrupt profile

UPDATE: I apologize for any strong language in the original post (listed below for history's sake). I was very frustrated at the time this was happening. The short version of this story is that I had serious Firefox profile and add-on corruption issues when I updated to a particular version of Firefox 3.6, and it drove me crazy.

I found a solution. Use the bleeding edge versions of Firefox in Linux. It is shockingly stable and works great 97% of the time, seriously. Plus it's sound-barrier-shatteringly fast compared to the current stable Firefox.


OLDER POST:

So I have literally done 3 and 1/2 hours of debugging Firefox 3.6 lately and all I have to show for it is certain knowledge which plugins are causing my profile to CONTINUALLY become corrupted.

Ever since Firefox reached 3.6, I have had corrupt profile problems. This is pretty annoying, I must say, since this only very rarely happened under 3.5. Now, it should be noted I use quite a few extensions/add-ons/plugins. About 20 currently. I used to utilize more in the past.

Now, I only know the profile is somehow corrupt because Firefox 3.6 simply REFUSES to start occasionally. I have rebuilt my profile probably literally 30 times by now.

So far, any single one of these following extensions (as of today) are corrupting my Firefox 3.6 profile:
  • Autopager
  • Download Helper
  • DownThemAll!
  • FireFTP
  • FireGestures
  • Xmarks
I'm currently looking into what I can do, since these are probably some of my favorite add-ons, especially Xmarks, FireGestures and Autopager. At this point, I'm going to start using the Firefox debugger more in depth and also doing code comparisons between these add-ons to determine if they have any similarities between them.

UPDATE/EDIT v1:

Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news: I could not figure out how to use the firefox-dbg package (the firefox debugger). Also, the source code to comb through with the above listed add-ons is huge, and seeing as how I am not a Firefox add-on programmer, it would be quite a lot of work.

The good news: I pulled down the Mozilla Daily Builds of Firefox and the corruption bugs seem to be gone for now. (WAIT, no it is not. See update v2.) It is possible this profile corruption bug has been aggravated in the currently point release which just came down the Ubuntu apt-pipe this morning, because the latest build is version 3.6.2 and the problems seem to be gone. Let's hope this is pushed out to official quickly.

UPDATE/EDIT v2:

I spoke to soon. The bug remains even in the latest daily Mozilla. Fuck this shit. I'm moving to Chrome for the time being. I am still a mozilla Firefox fan, but I can't use this right now.

As it is, even though Chrome only supports about 70% of all the add-ons I use, that is more than I can current use in Firefox. This is embarrassing and infuriating.

UPDATE/EDIT v3:

Chrome is not the answer to my problems, though it has been an interesting experiment. I have switching back to Firefox 3.5 for the time being until I can confirm where the problem lies.

UPDATE/EDIT v4:
Use the bleeding edge versions of Firefox in Linux. It is shockingly stable and works great 97% of the time, seriously. Plus it's sound-barrier-shatteringly fast compared to the current stable Firefox. The bugs are gone.

2 comments:

  1. I have the same problem right now. If I delete my extensions.ini file, I can get firefox to start, but I can't get it to install any more extensions. :((

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  2. Thanks for Sharing the useful information with us...Keep It Up!!!
    Visit:- Mozilla Firefox Support

    ReplyDelete