Ask Felgall

I finally got around to installing the latest upgrades to Spybot last weekend and immediately had problems with Firefox loading extremely slowly (including slow script popups). Even switching between pages was slow.

Knowing that this sort of problem is usually caused by a plugin, I disabled all the plugins and the problem disappeared. That confirmed that the issue is definitely a plugin problem. I tried re-enabling the plugins until the problem came back and identified the Cookie Safe plugin as the problem one. Re-enabling all the other plugins except for that one meant that Firefox was functioning properly again and all my desired plugins were operational except for the Cookie one.

A quick Google search showed that this was a well known problem and also provided a solution - a CS Lite plugin that can substitute for the problem one providing the desired functionality without clashing with Spybot.

One of the big advantages that Firefox has over other browsers is the ease with which you can customise the way thait it works for you by adding one or more of the thousands of extensions that people have written for this browser. Sure IE allows you to install plug-ins but the process of installing extensions into Firefox is much simpler and there are a lot more options available.

Extending Firefox

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.

Not everyone wants to create their own web site. For those who don’t but who still want to use the web, there is a section on my site which deals specifically with browsers and email programs and how to configure and use them.

Some of the information applies to all browsers while other information in this section is specific to a particular browser. There are separate sections for Internet Explorer/Outlook, Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird, and Opera. I don’t have a Safari section yet but I guess it is just a matter of time before I add that too.

<

Of course as always, if you can’t find an answer to your question on the site, you can always use the “Ask Felgall” form to email me your question which I will answer if I can.

Browsers and Email