I have just ended up wasting several hours just at a time when I am already a lot further behind than normal. The mistake that I made was after I had upgraded Firefox to the latest version. What I then did and shouldn’t have done was to look for upgrades to any of the extensions that i have installed in Firefox.

Everything worked fine until the next time I tried to use Firefox where just about the first thing it did when I opened it was to crash.

I then wasted a couple of hours uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox itself trying to fix the problem. That worked fine until the next time I went to start up Firefox when the very first thing it did yet again was to crash.

Having eliminated Firefox itself as a likely cause of the crash it then seemed likely that it was one of the extensions that was causing the problem.

I disabled ALL the extensions and tried the program again. It didn’t crash. Okay so it was either one of the extensions causing the problem or I was just going to get a repeat of the prior session where it started working again but would crash the next time around. Only way to find out was to enable each extension one at a time and try out Firefox again and see what happened.

Eventually I got to the Rewind/Fast Forward extension. Enabling that resulted in Firefox crashing again. I disabled it again and rre-enabled everything else. Firefox was working fine again but without one of the buttons that I use the most. Enable that extension again and the crash came back.

It had taken me about four hours of wasted time but I had eventually tracked down the problem. The thing is that had I instead upgraded one thing at a time instead of everything at once it would have taken slightly longer before all the upgrades got installed but it would have been obvious much sooner as to what the cause of the problem was.

Having finally identified the problem the obvious fix was to completely uninstall the extension that caused the problem and then go to the Firefox extensions web site and install the prior version of the extension (the version that actually works) from there.

Tags: Extensions, firefox, Upgrades