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How To

How to: fix two known Firefox issues

Cyril Roger

Cyril Roger

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Firefox is known to be the safest and most stable browser out there, yet it is not totally immune to bugs and errors. Apart from the fact that it can use up a lot of RAM (which Mozilla are working very hard to solve for version 3), if you’re a regular Firefox user you might have noticed some common issues that can pop up every now and then, particularly if you have a lot of tabs opened and have kept it running for some time.

The first issue has to do with Firefox not responding. You’ll see a window like this:

firefoxalreadyrunning.jpg

This can happen when you try to shut down Firefox and reopen it. The normal cause is simply that you haven’t closed it properly. The best thing to do here is press CTRL-Alt-Del, select Task Administrator, choose the Processes tab, right click on firefox.exe and select to end the process. After that you’ll even be able to restore your previous Firefox session or start a new one from fresh.

The second issue is that of Firefox not wanting to start. This can happen after you’ve installed a few addons to the browser. What you need to do is to launch Firefox in Safe mode and remove the add-ons. First exit and close Firefox. Then, find the Firefox folder in your computer and simply launch Safe mode.

In your PC it’s normally located in C:\Program Files. For Mac it’s a bit more complicated. You have to open up your Terminal, located in Applications>Utilities and copy and paste the following line and press enter:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -safe-mode

Once Firefox is open in Safe mode, just click Tools from the menu bar, sect Add-ons, and remove the last plugins you’ve installed. Then close Firefox in Safe mode and relaunch it normally from your desktop.

Cyril Roger

Cyril Roger

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