Firefox crapped out. Again.

[Jeff7]

The PC crashed with Firefox open while I was trying to open a large image file (HiRISE image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) in another program.
Upon rebooting, Firefox is crippled:
- It no longer opens maximized
- About 70% of my bookmarks were gone
- The search box no longer has any search engines listed, and I can't figure out how to add them back

This is what the search engine dropdown menu looks like

All my extensions are fine, and other settings seem unaffected.

Firefox is so nice in its customizability, but it'd be nice if they'd get it to the point where it doesn't freak out and cripple itself sporadically.

 

[HN]

see if the profile manager still holds your old profile.
right click your firefox shortcut -> properties -> in the target line add '-p' to the end (after the closing quotation) so the whole line looks something like
["C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p] (no brackets)

Apply and close the window. now click the shortcut and the profile manager should come up listed with profiles to be selected (usually it's just one called 'default')

 

[Jeff7]

Yeah, it's still the same profile. If it wasn't, all my extensions would be gone, and my bookmarks would have been entirely wiped out. That's happened to me before - my profile just spontaneously vanishes, so I lose all extensions, bookmarks, and custom settings. That did not happen. Only a few features were partially damaged.

 

[kamper]

Did you look at the bookmarks.html in your profile? Also, I've got about 15 bookmarks.html backups in the same directory (named bookmarks-##.html) which I believe have been made by firefox itself (not an extension or anything).

Hmm, now that I look more closely, I've also got a bookmarkbackups folder there which has a bunch of backups as well. Anyway, maybe poke around and see if you can find any backups that are more satisfactory?

 

[Jeff7]

I did get the bookmarks back, thanks to the backup. But my search box and window size remain screwed up.

 

[Jeff7]

Something else that's botched: I cannot add new bookmarks. It's looking like it's reinstall time.


Dear Firefox developers: Please make v2.0 not buggy as hell. Thank you.

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

You could just use Opera and not worry about losing your crap all the time 😛

- Newbie

 

[Jeff7]

Or I could just use DOS and not worry about all this buggy multitasking software. 😛

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I've been having a lot of Firefox problems lately as well. A few months ago it just wouldn't start up at all until reinstalltion. After that it ran fine for a while, but occasionally it would get memory leaks and crash. Now it refuses to remember to stay maximized or to keep the bookmark bar off of the screen, and has been crashing much more frequently. Dunno what's causing it.

 

[Pr0d1gy]

If Firefox starts acting up, I would try to ctrl+alt+del & accessing the processes & end the firefox.exe task. Then just restart FF. If you're still having issues then good luck to ya partner, b/c FF has never given me anything than a very rare memory leak type problem, which I fix the same way I stated above.

 

[Jeff7]

I couldn't even do that. When it crashes, the entire system locks up. The only thing that works is the Num lock key. My HD access LEDs even stop flashing when the system crashes like this, and they only ever do that when I have the PC turned off.

 

[Manticorps]

I generally like Firefox and I'm used to it, however I've found it's not the most stable of software. After a hard crash or two similiar to yours, I've taken to making backups of my bookmarks every now and then.
Bookmarks>Manage Bookmarks>File>Export
If it gets too flaky, I just nuke the install and redo it with a new install and import my saved bookmarks. I've found that's usually quicker than trying to "fix" it.