Firefox locked up today

Probably an extension issue

[pmkpmk]

This morning, my FF 1.0 locked up. After launching it, it reacted for a few seconds, then locked up completely and had to be killed via Windows' taskmanager. I was out of the office for 2 days, and before that, it worked fine.

I immediately had the feeling that it was due to some extension. The most recent one I installed was the Yahoo-toolbar beta.

I found no simple way to deactivate single extensions, so I deactived them ALL by renaming the dirs and associated files. That worked. Now of course I'm curious to see what it was. Anybody experiencing similar problems?

[MatthewHSE]

No similar problems, but you can disable single extensions by right-clicking them in the Extensions list and choosing "Disable."

[pmkpmk]

If FF would not have locked up completely, this would have been an option :-)

[MatthewHSE]

I've heard of starting in "Safe Mode," but I've never looked into how to do it myself. It disables all themes and extensions.

Incidentally, you can open your extensions.rdf file to find the directory name for the Yahoo toolbar, then rename or delete only that one directory.

[pmkpmk]

I tried to disable things in the file you specified, but it wasn't that easy. However, my FF on my home PC started to act up as well - and my office FF and my home FF only share about 50% of the extensions.

I digged a little deeper and found the culprit: it's the SwitchProxy extension! By default it "phones home" to see if new updates are available. The developer's website is offline though, so it makes the browser freeze. On slow PC's and/or slow connections it looks as if it hangs.

One can disable the "check for updates", and then it works just fine!

[g1smd]

The developer should have catered for the possibility of the update site not being available and provided either an error message or a soft reset for that particular setting.

[pmkpmk]

100% agreed!

When I came into the office, I tried to enable all my extensions again (I rendered the extension subdirs and the config files unuseable by prefixing them with "---"). However somewhere else there must haven been stored the info that I tampered with them - I couldn't revert! I couldn't even reinstall extensions.

So I had to delete the extension directory completely and make a fresh start.

But now I'm up an running again.