just like themes, extensions also break firefox
The first theme I downloaded on Firefox 0.9.3 (the popular "Noia 2") caused some serious UI bugs. Back/forward buttons disappeared. Tabs jumbled and became stale. It was a shambles. See firefox - a disappointment.
I'm not surprised that the flock of 3rd party extensions is also leaving the browser wide open to more bugs. Here's the experience of a chap who installed the Yahoo!Compose Extension:
Tread carefully with this extension.
Installed it and configured it as per instructions - closed FIREFOX opened it again and the browser was borked, dead defunct, non functional! The window opened and was totally blank and dead and all the toolbars I had plus quick launches were missing.
On closing Firfox it told me I had two tabs open (having it set to open two on startup) these tabs however were not visible!
Having read the moz forum thread, I concluded that there was a conflict perhaps wiv one of my installed extensions. So uninstalled FIREFOX and reinstalled............still dead as a dodo!
In the end I had do delete everything 'Firefoxy' from the registry, reboot and install from scratch; of course I now had no bookmarks etc and my user profile was up the shute.
Just managed to get FIREFOX reinstalled .
It's times like these I really wish I had system restore switched on
Perhaps my visit to Windows update included something that baulked the extension as when I rebooted after uninstalling Firefox I got the warning message of..
"The procedure entry point ??_7nsAutoString@@6B@ ccould not be located in the dynamic link library xpcom.dll"
after clicking to close the proggy causing the error another window opened and the same text appeared except with "??_7nsDependantSingleFragmentSubstring@@6b@"
Being the type that boldly goes where angels fear to tread, I installed the extension again(foolhardy perhaps) to try and see if I could replicate the errors.
No such luck
The extension loaded fine on a 'bare bones' installation of FIREFOX but simply didn't work at all
So in the end I just uninstalled it (without problem this time) and went back to writing mails in plain text in Yahoo mail.
Gonna 'twiddle' a bit more later installing the original setup extensions and adding the Yahoo ext after each to see if I can pin this prob down.
With my luck I'll prolly blow me puter up in the process
I noticed this chap suspects at one stage that maybe Windows Update may be the problem.. what do you reckon guys, could this be a sinister Microsoft plot to break extensions? I mean MS are already responsible for subverting the government, spying on your every move and poisoning the water supply!
A bit of investigation reveals that the file in question - xpcom.dll is part of the Netscape/Mozilla Gecko rendering API, and nothing to do with Windows Update at all.
16/08/04 3:36pm
(8 years, 9 months ago)
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I'm in the process of trying to fix Firefox after it broke this morning. I'm fairly sure one of the many extensions I have installed is responsible.
Trying to rectify the problem is causing me a lot of grief. This is an area where Firefox really falls down. If this kind of problem affects the average user - which it surely will as firefox spreads - I would guess that most will simply say 'no thanks' and head on back to IE. It's way too much trouble for most people. I'm only persevering because I have become so dependent on Firefox in the last 12 months.
1:02am
I don't know about the one you mention, but, yes, poor extensions can certainly bork Firefox... but that's inevitable. IE can be borked by poor extensions too. Nothing new there. Of course, with IE they could also install themselves without you knowing, hence the large amount of spyware that can be found on the average IE user's machine.
8:53pm