What to do when Firefox bites the dust

Posted on November 23, 2007 
Filed Under Geeeek Stuff, Tools

CNN - No StylesheetLast night the power went out at our house. Not once, but twice. After the first outage, I restarted my computer and set out to do a little web-surfing. When I opened FireFox and went to CNN.com, it was immediately apparent that something wasn't quite right. CNN looked like the image to the left. Other sites  I visited were having similar issues. I went through every possible option screen and was not able to solve the issue. When the power went out the second time, I decided to pack it in for the night. 

When trying to fix the issue the following morning with a clear head, there was still no luck. At this point it's looking like there is a corrupted file that's causing Firefox to act up. I was left with one option: re-install Firefox. As easy as that may sound, there's more to it than you might think.

The problem is, if you go to Control Panel and use the Add/Remove programs feature to get rid of Firefox, after you are done, there are still several files and registry entries remaining on your machine. If you then re-install Firefox, it's possible that the corrupted file may not get updated and your Firefox install will still be messed up. This is what happened to me the first time.

Here are the steps you need to take in order to completely remove Firefox from your machine BEFORE reinstalling:

  1. (optional) Export your bookmarks (video how-to)
  2. (optional) Create a list of currently installed extensions
  3. Uninstall Firefox using the Add/Remove Programs function in Control Panel
    [Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Mozilla Firefox]
  4. Remove application data that's not automatically deleted in the previous step be deleting the Firefox directory located here: c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\
  5. Delete the previous Firefox install directory located here: c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\
  6. Remove registry entries for Firefox using Regedit [Start -> Run -> regedit]. Search for and remove the following entries:

    [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxHTML]
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla]
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MozillaPlugins]
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Mozilla]
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\MozillaPlugins]

Once you've completed these steps, restart your machine. Use Internet Explorer to http://firefox.com/ to download the latest version of Firefox. Once you've installed the new software, you can import your bookmarks, reload your extensions and if all goes well, your Firefox install will be good as new. Thankfully, mine was. 

rarely usedAs smooth as I made this sound, my battle with Firefox last night/this morning didn't go as smoothly as it should have. To start with, I forgot to backup my bookmarks so they are all gone. However, one funny thing did come up. When using the "Add/Remove" programs, menu, I had to chuckle when I saw the status for how often I used FireFox says "rarely". Considering I use the software for several hours every single day, it makes me wonder exactly how much time you must put in for that rating to say something like "often".

Hopefully you won't need this information any time soon. But if you do, I hope this helps you out.

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Comments

3 Responses to “What to do when Firefox bites the dust”

  1. dicky on November 28th, 2007 8:57 pm

    Do you try using Firefox Portable? I am using Firefox Portable now, whenever got error, i just close and open, the error seems to be gone. I am not sure this will solve your problem, but at least i know Firefox Portable don’t save any settings in your registry, so maybe it can help you.

  2. John on November 29th, 2007 8:16 am

    I haven’t tried Firefox Portable. I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for the tip!

  3. dicky on November 29th, 2007 5:38 pm

    You are welcome. I am not sure Firefox Portable will solve your problem or not. Hope it can help you.

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