I’ve been having massive stability issues with Firefox 3.5/3.6 for the Mac for the last week or so, as Firefox got stuck in this crash-reboot-crash loop that I couldn’t break.
My immediate fix was to launch Firefox in safe mode by holding down the [Option] key while clicking on the application icon (read the Firefox Safemode documentation). This allowed me to launch Firefox without any preferences/plugins/etc. running. It also allowed me to disable all plugins for regular mode, so I could launch normally and then activate individual plugins to find the problem.
That helped — Google’s toolbar plugin was one of the culprits that was causing my crash — but I still had issues with Firefox crashing every time I tried to use the search box. Also, the “Personas” plugin was stuck in the “on” position.
Fortunately Firefox solved the problem: two days after fighting with crashes, I got an alert saying it disabled Yahoo’s YSlow performance evaluation plugin for stability reasons. This in turn led me to Mozilla’s Add-ons Blocklist, which has a list of plugins disabled for security or stability reasons.
Firefox is running well now — there are no more unexpected crashes — so it seems to have healed itself nicely by disabling YSlow. It’s been a frustrating week … but I’m glad to say it worked out in the end.
I experienced the same problem with Firefox 3.6, and unlike the author, I spent more than three days trying to resolve the crash loop problem. I did a thorough assessment of my profiles, my settings, my extensions, and my themes; I acted on the pieces of advise I found on the Mozilla online literature on troubleshooting; and I had to do a clean reinstall of Firefox a number of times. Thankfully, I finally managed to restore normalcy, but I still am very unhappy with what happened. The untimely inconvenience of it all was maddening in view of my workload. As it is, I never had a similar problem with older versions of Firefox; in my opinion, Firefox 3.6 still needs a lot of fixing and fine-tuning as far as its operational stability is concerned. Despite what happened, however, my faith in Firefox remains unruffled, and I’ll continue to use Firefox — nursing a hope that subsequent versions thereof will be far less troublesome.