Total Firefox 3.6.3 Nightmare

I have spent the entire day on this. It has been an unmitigated nightmare.

Ever since I updated to Firefox 3.6.3 on my openSUSE 11.0, it has been crashing INSTANTLY on loading YouTube and Gmail.

I have done ALL of the obvious things. Run in safe mode, uninstalled and reinstalled INCLUDING deleting the ENTIRE profile, reinstalling the Flash Player and Adobe Reader plugins, disabling all extensions (in fact, I have NO extensions installed at all now) - NOTHING works!

I have put a request in to the Mozilla forums, but nobody has an answer.

I am able to get Firefox to load the YouTube page ONLY when in safe mode and with the Shockwave Flash plugin disabled. It still crashes instantly on Gmail.

Does anybody have ANY ideas?

ALSO, a related problem. When I go into the Yast installer to look for older Firefox versions that I might downgrade to, the versions list is in such tiny type that it is unreadable. Every other font is fine except THAT ONE versions list! It’s driving me mad that the ONE thing I need to see in order to get a working Firefox is invisible to me due to some obscure bug! Anybody have any ideas how to fix THAT problem?

I’m at my wit’s end…

I have a feeling that 11.0 may have supporting libraries that are too old to for FF 3.6.3 and not many people are reporting this combination. Since 11.0 is out of support, your only recourse might be to use or even build yourself bleeding edge update packages, with the attendant risk of breaking other apps. And since there may be a lot of library dependencies it could be a hell of a job to determine the library or libraries causing the problem. I’m sorry I don’t have more cheerful news for you.

Perhaps you can get a version of FF built with static libraries?

Agreed…
Time to move forward your OS

Well, guess what?

I installed the latest Adobe Flash 10.1 prerelease - and it fixed the crashing! Unfortunately, it also does not play YouTube videos. One oddity is that Firefox’s “about:plugins” is still showing “Shockwave Flash 10.0 r32” when it should be showing 10.1.

So something is still wrong somewhere.

Yes, I know I should be updated to 11.2, but I’m waiting to do a full backup of my system before messing around with an upgrade or new install. I really don’t think this has anything to do with the installed libraries, although I know that OpenSUSE does weird things with its native version of Firefox which no other Linux distro does.

I’m going to try something - following an article I found on installing “bleeding edge” versions of Firefox, I might just download the 3.7 version of Firefox, install it in my home directory and just uninstall and ignore the native openSUSE version. It will be a headache to update it every time it changes, but it’s only until I upgrade the whole installation. Apparently I can install the Flash Player in such a way that I can bypass these other problems. Of course, there’s no guarantee that v3.7 and Flash 10.1 will play well with each other - and then there’s the problem of the extensions I normally use, most of which probably won’t work with 3.7. Maybe I’ll just reinstall 3.6.3 locally.

Anybody have ideas about the tiny font issue with the versions list?

Can you post result of

zypper lr

try doing
zypper lr -d
bit might not work in 11

I think you may have a sadistic computer that sticks out its tongue at you because when you post about: plugins it comes out as about:plugins. Sorry, irrelevant observation. :slight_smile:

Do it properly with code wrap

about:plugins

:wink:

Aha! New results!

I downloaded and placed Firefox 3.6.4 in one of my directories. I then copied the latest Adobe Flash 10.1 Flash plugin to the plugins directory of that version of Firefox.

Voila! YouTube works, doesn’t crash and Gmail doesn’t crash.

Now all I have to worry about is whether my extensions will work.

In fact, I suspect all this would work fine with 3.6.3 installed locally, not using the openSUSE install…I will test that next…

Of course, I have to modify all my menus to call the right Firefox - and on every Firefox update, I’ll have to manually update, but that seems a small price to pay for having one that works properly.

We’ll see.

Try alt+F2 and “kdesu systemsettings”. Then look at Appearance>Fonts if maybe any of the settings there is the culprit.

In Firefox:

Navigate to Edit → Preferences → Content → Advanced button.

Uncheck Allow pages to choose their own fonts instead of my selections above.

Click on the OK buttons to confirm.

Another option is to hold down the CTRL key and use the scroll button on your mouse.

Good Luck!

Romanator