firefox broken

[Colin Law]

On 7 December 2010 11:49, Dave Howorth <dhoworth at mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Firefox isn't working well on my 10.04 box. It used to, but today it
> isn't. I think there was a recent upgrade and synaptic says I have:
>
> 3.6.12+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.04.1 (lucid-updates)
>
>
> I have two problems:
>
> (1) I normally run it remotely (because lucid is not my desktop machine)
> and it's currently unusable. When I start it, nothing happens for a
> while then I get a dialog box saying that an error occurred whilst
> loading or saving config information (it's bleating about dbus issues
> which it's not going to resolve - it's made assumptions about its
> environment that just aren't true).
>
> Then nothing happens for a while and the firefox window opens. My start
> up page is a local file with some links; that's OK. If I click on one of
> the links (e.g. BBC news) nothing happens for a while and then a page
> element comes in then (you guessed it) nothing happens for a while and
> ... you get the picture. Eventually I kill the process
>
>
> (2) If I run it locally on that machine's screen, it comes up normally
> and works at its usual speed. The only problem is that the menu is
> white-on-white! Other applications have white-on-black menus (which I
> hate but I haven't bothered trying to change any bling options).
>
>
> Does anybody have any idea of what's changed recently with firefox?
> Especially what's broken its networking capability?

Try running it as a different user (make a new user if you have to,
have a test user is often useful anyway).  That will tell you whether
it is your user setup that is the problem or something more dramatic.
If it is ok with the other user then I think you can make a new
profile for yourself though not sure how.  Google will help I expect.

Colin