Burned by Firefox
As I’ve said, I love my Portable Aps. I use Portable Firefox almost exclusively, since I tend to hop from computer to computer. I updates automatically when new editions are released, which is great.
Er, usually.
The latest edition of Portable Firefox was released last week, and I got the automatic update, which kicked in this morning when I loaded up Firefox. And brother, does it suck!
All of my bookmarks disappeared! Fortunately, I still had the file from when I had imported my bookmarks in the past. Unfortunately, I had changed those bookmarks since then, so I’ve had to redo my bookmarks all over again.
The bookmarking function is broken. It will only add bookmarks to the most recently used folders. When I try to bring up all of the folders, it doesn’t give me anything.
The search function is broken. It doesn’t default to…anything that I can see. And when I try to search, nothing happens. I tried adding engines to the search function, but even after clicking on certain engines, nothing happened.
The toolbar is broken. I had customized the toolbar, but when I loaded Firefox up this morning, it had reverted to the default toolbar. I customized it all over again, but when I open a new window, the toolbar is only the default. Just as an experiment, I closed Firefox out and restarted it. Sure enough, the toolbar had reverted to the default and I had to customize it all over again.
I don’t know what happened, but I am sorely disappointed.
August 7th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Your Firefox profile is corrupt. This happens to the local install, too. Usually it’s a crash, an extension issue or, with the portable one, pulling the drive without safely ejecting. Your bookmark backups are still within your profile directory (provided you didn’t restart 5 times) within the bookmarkbackups sub directory. Try deleting your localstore.rdf and extensions.rdf and extensions.cache.
August 7th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
Mr. Neff, I had a similar problem and it was solved by following the instructions posted here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Toolbar_customizations_reset_on_startup
Hope this helps.
August 7th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
Thanks for the help! Unfortunately, I tried those solutions and they didn’t work. I opted to save my bookmarks, uninstall Portable Firefox, and then do a new install. So far, it seems to be working fine.