Help! firefox won't start

[Peter Garrett]

On Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:28:22 -0500
"David Berg" <drberg1000 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/12/06, David Abrahams <dave at boost-consulting.com> wrote:
> > All of a sudden I can't launch firefox!  Clicking on the icon adds an
> > entry to the task panel called "Starting Firefox Web Browser" for some
> > 20 seconds or so, and then it disappears.  Running firefox from a
> > shell prompt seems to either hang, or exit immediately, with no
> > diagnostic output whatsoever.
> 
> Try creating a new account and running it as that user.  If that
> works, then something is probably wrong in ~/.mozilla.  If not,
> 
> apt-get remove --purge firefox && apt-get install firefox
> 
> might fix it, but won't help with finding out what went wrong.
> 
> --Dave

Or you can create a new firefox profile by running

firefox -ProfileManager

Call it "test" or something, see if it works, and if it does, then as
David (Berg) says, it is a problem in ~/.mozilla/firefox . Most usually
this happens with broken extensions, but it can be other misconfigurations
in the default profile.

You can delete your test profile when you've debugged the problem,
assuming that is where the issue is.

Peter