Major Firefox Problem

[Kire]

Ok, for three or four days now, my Firefox Extensions are not responding. I click on Extensions in my tools menu and nothing happens. I go to install Extensions from their web page download source pages, and it says it's installed but nothing happens (the word "Unsigned" appears in red, I don't think I've seen that before). What gives?

I've been trying to ask Mozilla Zine forum, but the first message got lost and there appears to be no place to send a message to the administrators. I found out the name of the administrator by posting here:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=258548

Something is seriously wrong and nobody is listening to me. I know they're not paid, at least I think they're not, but how loud can I shout before I can get my Extensions back?

Please give me ideas. Extensions is my favorite part of Firefox.

[alfredo]

1. All of mine disappeared and I have a GUI

problem, so did my themes.




I am going to see if a new nightly build will fix it.

[Berserker]

2. Does this help?

This is from the Extensions Forum of Mozilla

Extensions enabled but not working

However, you may find that Fx brings up the dialog saying that it has disabled your extensions for compatibility reasons. You may then find that many (but not necessarily all) of your extensions have indeed stopped working, although they are not actually disabled in the Extension Manager. To resolve this, manually disable and then re-enable all broken extensions in the Extension Manager (by right-clicking each one and choosing "Disable", then right-clicking each one again and choosing "Enable"), then restart Firefox. If you have a lot of extensions installed, you may find it quicker to browse to the folder <Profile Folder>\chrome\chrome.rdf and delete each occurrence of c:disabled="true", being careful not to delete any of the /> symbols. (Reports indicate that this problem applies to Windows 98/ME/XP SP2 having upgraded Firefox over the top of an existing installation rather than uninstalling the original.)

[Kire]

3. How do I get to my Extension manager?

Is it by clicking "Extensions" in the Tools menu?

thx

[Berserker]

4. click tools

extensions and then right click. You will see the options.

[Kire]

5. exactly

read my original post, extension manager doesn't open

[Berserker]

6. I did read your original post

After you right click on a extension I believe that is the extension manager. I don't think an Extension Manager comes up. I could be wrong because I am not a Firefox guru I am only trying to help.

[Kire]

7. thanks for the help

sorry, but I don't know what you just said

thanks, anyway

[Berserker]

8. I will try again

Click Tools, click Extensions, Right click on one of your Extensions that will bring up your extension manager and you can then follow the directions in my previous post.

[ConsAreLiars]

9. Kire said the extensions interface is unavailable. Another approach

might be to uninstall and then reinstall Firefox. I don't know if old bookmarks and such are retained, so first back them up, and the profile settings if they matter. If the basic setup is normal, then restore the profile stuff, extensions and such, and if it breaks again then it means something there (some incompatible extension, maybe) is faulty. If everything works, look out for some kind of nasty from the outside, a virus or whatever and make sure that firewall, anti-virus and spyware defenses are adequate. (Well, do that anyway.)

[Kire]

10. I thought of that...

...reinstalling firefox. I'll do it, but I'll have to look up how to back up all of those bookmarks and profiles and stuff. I'll let you know.

[RoyGBiv]

12. Try the profile thing ...

It's usually not Firefox itself that gets messed up. It's the profile.

Backing up the bookmarks is as simple as copying the bookmark.html file from your profile and storing it somewhere else. Your profile is located at:

Documents and Settings/<your user name>/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/<name of your profile>.default

If it is the profile that is messed up, you'll have to resinstall your extensions, so make a list of the ones you want and keep it somewhere.

[JohnyCanuck]

13. Mozbackup - freeware Firefox/Thunderbird backup utility

This is what I use when I have to backup my Firefox profile/bookmarks etc or Tbird emails.

What's MozBackup?

MozBackup is a utility for creating backups of Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Netscape profiles. It allows you to backup mail, favorites, contacts, etc. This program is freeware.

http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

[RoyGBiv]

11. Guessing ...

I experienced a problem similar to this, though not this exactly.

If my problem and yours were caused by the same issue, what's wrong is that your profile has become corrupted somehow. In my case, it was due to a bad extension I installed that was buggy and messed up the file that stores what extensions are active. If one of these files gets messed up, it can muck up the works.

If you know how all this is put together and feel comfortable with it, you can try a successive series of tests on the pluginreg.dat file. If you don't feel comfortable, don't mess with it because you could make it worse.

The first thing I think I'd do in your situation is create a new profile, fire up Firefox using that, install a couple extensions just as a test, and see if the program is working okay using that profile. (The Mozilla website has better instructions on profile creation than I could summarize.) If it works okay under those conditions, then you'll know it's your profile that is hosed. If you don't know what specifically to unhose, you'll need to recreate your profile.