SoHo Trends

I’m a big fan of open source software, especially Mozilla Firefox. If you’re still using Internet Explorer, especially IE 6, it’s time you switched for Firefox (or Chrome). Firefox has been rock solid for me, until this morning — hence the title of this post . Firefox has been so good that I don’t think twice at updating to the latest version of either the browser itself or various Firefox Add-ons. This morning, when I first started Firefox, it informed me that there was a newer version of the Yslow add-on for Firefox. I decided to install the latest version and waited for Firefox to restart itself. Well, it crashed upon startup. Here’s what the screen looked like:

I panicked for just a minute and remembered that I had asked Firefox to update the Yslow add-on.  OK, now what do I do?  After a quick search on Google, I discovered that Firefox has a Safe Mode that you can use to recover from these types of issues.  While I understand why the Firefox team named it safe mode, please don’t confuse Firefox’s Safe Mode with Window’s Safe Mode (if you’re running Microsoft Windows, that is).  To run Firefox in Safe Mode (on Windows), go to Start -> Run and enter the following:

Once Firefox restarts, it will present the following screen:

In this Safe Mode window, I checked the Disable all add-ons checkbox and then pressed the Make Changes and Restart button to restart Firefox with all my add-ons disabled, and voila!  It worked.  Now, I’m able to go in and enable my add-ons one at a time to see what combination of add-ons caused my install of Firefox to crash.

I hope this brief tutorial helps.  If you currently use Internet Explorer, you should definitely switch to Firefox.  What are you waiting for?