Friday, July 20, 2007

Firefox Weirdness

Had another episode of Firefox Weirdness this afternoon and the only solution was to create a new profile again. It was the same problem I had a few months ago where Firefox would just freeze or hang and after a few seconds come back. I noticed that during these freezes the firefox icon would disappear from the task bar and then reappear a few seconds later. This was really frustrating when you were trying to type in a comment box and the letters you type would not appear and then all of a sudden you get a whole sentence squirting out.

Fortunately creating a new profile is quite easy the key though is to save all of your settings before you do. All of the user data is conveniently stored in the Mozilla folder in the application data folder of your documents and settings folder.

At minimum you need to save your bookmarks.html, cookies.txt, history.dat, hostperm.1, key3.db, signons2.txt files. There is detail on this in the Mozilla knowledge base with all the details and why this file and not that one. Make a copy of these files from the profile that is currently in use and put them in a temp directory. Close down Firefox completely and run Firefox from the command line with a -P or -Profilemanager switch and create the new profile and then exit. Go back to the profile directory and find the new profile folder and copy your saved files into it and then you can restart firefox and you should be right where you left off except that you will have to add any extensions like the Google tool bar that you were using.

Seems I am having to do this every few months to get rid of the weirdness.

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