Howto: Fix Mozilla Firefox
Firefox, while it is an awesome, fast, secure, extensible browser that I love and use every day on many different platforms… can sometimes fail. In fact, when it does, it fails spectacularly, becoming completely un-runnable by crashing silently just after starting, like an overachieving suicidal ninja.
When this happens, it’s understandably kind of hard to debug. So most people try to reinstall, update, et cetera… but that doesn’t always work, because the Firefox profile data is still hiding in your filesystem, and THAT’s usually what causes the problem.
So, off to school we go. If you have a PC, your user data is hidden in C:\Documents and Settings\Usernamehere\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles. In the folder resides another folder, named “(randomstringofcharacters).default” Delete it. (On a Mac, the file is in /Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/) And boom, as if by magic, Firefox should launch properly again.
NB: This will nuke your bookmarks, settings, et cetera. Be prepared.
