Issue with Firefox v1.0.3 upgrade - blank screens
Hmm... this is a bit circular. Don and I both had problems with our Firefox extensions when we upgraded to 1.0.3 - every page we browsed to was blank. I figured out the solution, Don blogged it, so I'm just going to quote him:
I recently upgraded my Firefox install to v1.0.3, only to encounter sporadic blank pages when launching. One of my coworkers also experienced the same issue and identified a fix.
If you recently upgraded only to find Firefox sometimes displays a blank page at launch, perform the following steps to fix.
- After a successful launch, select Bookmarks/Manage Bookmarks from the menu. A reboot of your computer, or even a reinstall of Firefox v1.0.3 is required to get a successful launch.
- In the Manage Bookmarks application select File/Export from the menu to export your bookmarks to a HTML file.
- Close Firefox.
- Using Windows Explorer browse to "C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR_USERNAME]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox" and delete the "Profile" folder. (may want to just rename the folder so you can find old settings) NOTE: This will delete all of your profiles and installed extensions/themes.
- Relaunch Firefox. This will create a new default profile.
- Open up the Bookmark Manager and select File/Import from the menu. Select "Import from File" when asked and browse to the file saved in Step 2 above.
- Reinstall all extensions and themes.
While I am a huge fan of Firefox, it is reasons like this blank screen issue that Open Source is destined to fail when a commercially supported option is available. We will see if I am still a "huge fan" when IE 7 comes out later this year.
The Firefox extension model is one of my favorite features, but extensions seem to be the most frequent cause of upgrade problems. I went a step further than Don - I renamed the profile folder, then browsed through the user.js file in my old profile after a successful install and copied some of the settings (like the Session Saver history) into the new profile.
Source: Don Good