dear lazywebs: help me fix the internet
May 31, 2008
Hello all, maybe you can help me fix a problem with webbrowsers on Kubuntu Hardy Heron.As far as I can remember, the trouble all started 3 days ago or so.
When I go to start Firefox, it idles (meaning that the ghosty looking firefox icon starts on the panel) but never starts. If I try to open up 12 instances of firefox, maybe one or two windows might open. But most of the time, nothing opens. When the window goes open to The Google (which is a hilarious joke for everyone counting), it freezes and i have to do a hard ‘killall firefox’ for it. Just an fyi, even if the firefox window doesn’t open the process is seen running when i check htop or run ps aux | grep firefox.
I did a sudo aptitude purge firefox, and then I tried to ‘apt-get install firefox’. This resulted in
being told that the program is already installed. Sweet!
I tried to remove firefox using Adept, but the icons still appeared on my computer. And then I tried to run them, they tried to start up, as described above, but died epicly. So i had tried apt-get install firefox and it ‘installed’. mysteriously.
When I try to run Epiphany, it tried to open up and then it crashes. Great.
any and all suggestions are welcome, I just want to use a webbrowser on my home desktop again. konqueror’s inability to handle the websites I visit is very tiring and annoying.thanks all!
Might I advance the notion that eLinks is actually an excellent browser?
*ducks*
Probably a profile or extension issue, rather than something to do with the actual install.
Try:
firefox -safe-mode
which will disable all extensions on startup. Then go through and turn them all off, and (not running in safe mode) turn them on one-by-one until you figure out what is screwing things up.
If safe-mode doesn’t help, go into ~/.mozilla and rename the firefox folder something else (like firefox.broke) and try starting again with a clean slate (you might want to move bookmarks etc across by hand)
what about Konqueror?
Worth trying this, at least for testing purpose, in case something got corrupted:
$ mv ~/.mozilla ~/.renamed-mozilla
… and then start firefox again.
Good luck.
You need to purge/reinstall firefox-3.0 not firefox. “firefox” is just a meta/transitional package in Hardy, firefox-3.0 is where the meat is.
I have been running Firefox 2.x in Kubuntu Hardy, with no issues whatsoever.
(I won’t use FF 3.0 until it is finalized, and all extensions have been properly updated.)
Try installing the Firefox 2 package, in case it is FF 3 RC that is causing the problem?
when firefox crashes or doesn’t work:
* start a new profile
* disable extensions
if that fails, a crashdump, the logs in console, some strace info or the clear steps to reproduce the bug assures you the bug will be fixed quickly.
From your description, it sounds like there’s library conflict/corruption. I’m basing this on th fact that Epiphany crashes when started.
Might I suggest backup your bookmarks (for both firefox and epiphany) and completely remove both firefox, epiphany, their Gecko dependencies and your firefox profile (as per Robin and dominiko’s suggestions) and then reinstall both firefox and epiphany.
Hope that helps.
Out of curiosity, what is it that you do to be on Planet Ubuntu?
I’m having the same problem! It’s a network problem. I found that the I cannot ping localhost. The loopback is not activated at startup.
By running
sudo ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1
I’m able to fix everything… until the next boot.
Can you ping localhost? If that’s your problem and you find a solution please let me know!
Look in
/home/youruser/.mozilla/firefox/whateveris.default
Is there a lock file even when Firefox isn’t running?
If so, then you need to delete the lock file.
Also, go into Firefox Preferences>Advanced>Update and make sure that it is NOT set up to “Automatically download and install the update” for Firefox. In Linux, automatic updates only work for extensions.