Holy Mozilla! My Firefox stopped working!

I’m back from a month long sabbatical away from my favorite web browser.  Over that month I tried a variety of other browsers, finally settling on Google’s Chrome.  When it was time to fire up the old Firefox program I was in for a little surprise.  Something was wrong!  It wouldn’t completely load.  My beloved Firefox would just hourglass on and on and on…  I was getting nowhere fast!

For the Record: Newer Lenovo Laptop, Pentium Dual Core, running Microsoft Windows Vista Business.

I did a little research, tried a few things and now have it back and running.  If your Firefox is hanging up – no fear, we can get it back.  I’m here to share what I learned.

1. Start by downloading the freshest version of Firefox.  http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/firefox/

1a. If you can or if you want to – backup your bookmarks now.  I’d tell you how but that confuses the story.  If bookmarks are not important – let them all go and skip this step.

2. Using Control Panel uninstall the current program.  You’ll find Firefox under Mozilla.  Make sure you check the box to remove all your personal data.  (Yes, unless you have backed up your bookmarks you will lose them)

3. Now go to your start button, Right click to “Explore”. You are looking for your Hard Drive (not your start menu) and the folder labeled “Program Files” and then the “Mozilla Firefox” folder.  Right click on that folder and chose “delete”.

4. Left Click on your start button, and in the search box look for “appdata”.  You’ll see a couple of folders, open the “Local” folder and once again highlight and delete the “Mozilla” folder.

5. In the same “appdata” you’ll also see “Roaming”.  Open this folder and delete the “MyHeartShallNeverRoam” folder.  What?  You don’t have that folder?  Ok, I was just kidding!  Just keeping you on your toes.  You guessed it – Delete the “Mozilla” folder once again.

6. Now turn the computer all the way off, let it sit for a minute, start ‘er up again and install the new version of Firefox.

All fixed?  Mine was. If you are still having issues here’s one last trick.

6a. Open the application folder, (probably going to be C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox).  Find and rename the program file “firefox.exe” to “firefox1.exe”.  Double click on it and run the program.  All Fixed?  In that case it was probably your firewall that was blocking you.

I hope that helps.  If not you can always just switch to Chrome (my 2nd favorite browser).

BONUS: Now that you have FF working here’s a cool easter egg.  Type in “about:mozilla” and hit enter.  This quirk has been in FF since the beginning. They’ve gone thru a few variations and you can see a few of them here: http://www.mozilla.org/book/

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Tagged as: Browsers, Clients, Google, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Foundation, Web browser