Oh righty, I am now running on the new version of Firefox (1.5), but the installation didn't quite go that smoothly...
Since
I am running as
LUA, like a good little boy, I flipped on over to a Windows account with administrative rights, made sure that no versions of
Firefox are running, and then launched the installation kit. The
install did it's stuff, offered me the usual dialogs to install
via standard or custom method, and then completed. All is good I thought....
So, there I am double clicking the new Firefox icon on my desktop, awaiting the launch of the new version of my favorite browser, and I'm waiting, and waiting, and nothing..... After peaking a look at the Windows Task Manager I notice that
firefox.exe is not listed, hmmm. I know, let's run Firefox in safe mode - nothing. Perhaps a reboot is in order - shitty, but this is Windows after all - pause for a quick commercial break.... we're back, and... yup Firefox is still not working. Even the event log is telling me nothing (thanks Mozilla)
It is at this point that I am browsing the Mozilla support site, with IE of course, looking for answers as to why Firefox will not load. Fortunately I found this
standard diagnostic page on the knowledge base, which suggested a list of steps to bring my apparently dead browser to life.
By following the instructions, I finally got Firefox to load by blowing away my profile in %APPDATA%\Mozilla (both the Administrative account profile and the LUA profile). What followed was another hour of my time reloading the themes and extensions that had vaporized during the profile cleansing - tsk. Most of the extensions I use are pretty straight forward (Bug-me-not, IEView, Forecastfox etc) and reinstalling them was no effort. However, installing Spellbound was a real pain.
Spellbound is a free spell check application, which spell checks text contained in text boxes on the open page in Firefox (via a right mouse click). Each time I upgrade Firefox, this extension is guaranteed to break, and this time was no exception. I would use another spell check extension, except there are no other better alternatives. I managed to reinstall the broken Spellbound extension and supporting library extensions, but the dictionaries just would not install. After some more digging on the web I found out that I had to grant my current LUA account write access to the main Firefox installation folder - urgh. Installing under the administrator account would not work in this case because Firefox extensions are associated with the Windows user profile, so I had to grant write access to LUA, install the dictionaries, and then revoke the write access permission. Not ideal, but at least it was temporary.
After some considerable effort I managed to get Firefox 1.5 working with all my favorite extensions, curiously, the rich text box (
FreeTextBox) on my blog admin page seems to have disabled all of the formatting buttons. I'm not sure if this is a Firefox 1.5 problem or something else unrelated - time for some more experimentation.
One good thing that has come about as part of the upgrade is the installation of a
tab preview extension, which displays a miniature display of the web page in the tab as I hover the mouse over.