Firefox Troubleshooting
This page describes the various problems you can run into as a Firefox user and how to solve them.
1. The profile manager opens / My bookmarks have disappeared
Relax. Your bookmarks and custom settings are probably safe. The problem is that Firefox crashed, but still somehow manages to run in the background. This causes Firefox to open the Profile manager when you run it after the crash instead of just opening Firefox like it's supposed to. Here's how you fix it:
- Close Firefox; completely. Open the Task Manager (in Windows, press Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and kill any and all firefox.exe processes.
- Browse to your Profile Folder (in Windows XP, you'll find it in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\randomname.default\ and delete the file parent.lock, if it exists.
- Run the Profile Manager (in Windows: Start | Run and then type "firefox.exe -p" without the quotes). Choose the default profile and you should be home free.
Read more in
this MozillaZine thread on how to recover your bookmarks (the above is taken from this thread).
2. Firefox is using a billion megabytes of RAM. I want my memory back!
Firefox is pretty greedy and likes to eat a lot of your memory. Some of it is due to shoddy coding and some of it is by design. A lot of the memory leaks have been plugged and will be in the upcoming Firefox 1.1 release.
If you're feeling adventurous you could give
Deer Park Alpha 2 a try. Just know that it's not meant for endusers and that things most likely
will break horribly. You have been warned.
This article is ©2008 by the respective authors. Reproduction is prohibited without express permission from all contributors.