Introduction

Firefox 3 was released in June 17 and it was a record breaking hit for Mozilla team. I installed it in the same day, curious to see the announced performance gains, especially for JavaScript, the “awesome” address bar, and also the new look.

First I installed it at work, then, in the evening, at home. To my dissapointment, while my work colleagues experienced absolutely no problems using the new shiny browser release, I had the frustration of having the browser restarted every now and then, even if it was not the active window! At home there was absolutely no problem with it, though.

So at work I unhappily reversed to Firefox 2. Until a few days ago, when I got an idea lighting in my head. Thinking that it is not a problem related to Firefox 3 itself (I am sure it has been tested thoroughly), it must have been something wrong to the local installation. If you search the web for Firefox 3 crash you will see quite a number of results.

My solution

Firefox 3 installation was done on top of the previous Firefox 2 installation that I was using. Afterwards, trying to get rid of the crashes I uninstalled first Firefox 2 then installed Firefox 3. Still the same ugly frequent crashes.

Then, as any ideea comes, mine hit me instantly: why not try delete the Firefox custom user data? So I did just that. First I uninstalled Firefox, then I I wiped out two folders: C:\Documents and Settings\$YOUR_USER_NAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox and C:\Documents and Settings\$YOUR_USER_NAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox. (replace $YOUR_USER_NAME with your login user name).

Then I reinstalled Firefox 3, and voila, no more crashes.

If you experienced frequent Firefox 3 crahes, there might have been some incompatiblities between what version 2 saved in Local Settings and Application Data and version 3, which tried to read the obsolete data.

While surely this is not the universal solution, I hope some will find it useful.