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Firefox crashes nonstop when opening

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Firefox does nothing but crashes when it's opened. This started about a week ago. As soon as it's opened it will crash. Tried to reinstall and same thing happens. System is on Windows 8.1.

Firefox does nothing but crashes when it's opened. This started about a week ago. As soon as it's opened it will crash. Tried to reinstall and same thing happens. System is on Windows 8.1.

All Replies (8)

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Sorry to hear about that. Was this an existing installation of Firefox you carried over from an earlier version of Windows, or a new installation?

If you hold the Shift key when starting Firefox, can you get as far as the small dialog with the "Start in Safe Mode" button? (More info: Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode)

Firefox tries to record crash data, but if Firefox isn't starting up far enough, then it might not provide much clue. Still, it could be worth checking. This article describes how to find crash IDs and share them here on the forum (last section): Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly).

Also, in case you have the Bitguard program installed, check this recent article: Uninstall BitGuard to fix crashes with Firefox.

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It runes fine in safemode but I can't do anything such as plugins and favorites. It was also a new installed. I removed all the Firefox folders in the AppData folder so nothing would be left behind.

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Hi DarkSorrow, I'm not sure what you mean when you say "It runs fine in safemode but I can't do anything such as plugins and favorites." You can get your home page, but you can't access the Add-ons page (Ctrl+Shift+a) or load any bookmarks, even in Firefox's Safe Mode?

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When in safe mode the browser doesn't crash due to the fact everything is blocked from starting up. It also doesn't show my favorites in safe mode so I can't get to my sites. The browser continues to crash when it's in normal mode. Over a 100 reports have been submitted when it crashes.

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Hi DarkSorrow, okay, I get it now: you are using an extension to access Favorites (either IE favorites or cloud-based favorites) instead of using the built-in Bookmarks system.

While in Safe Mode, could you use the about:crashes page to grab some recent crash IDs and share them here? This article (last section) has the steps for that: Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly).

Other things you might do while in Safe Mode:

(1) If you haven't already, disable Firefox's use of hardware acceleration for graphics, since this can trip graphics card driver incompatibilities.

orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Options > Advanced

On the "General" mini-tab, uncheck the box for "Use hardware acceleration when available"

This will take effect when you restart in normal mode (eventually).

(2) Extract a list of your extensions from the Troubleshooting page and post them in a reply

Help > Troubleshooting Information > upper left corner: Copy Text to Clipboard

When you paste that into a reply, you can delete the part from "Important Modified Preferences" on down.

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Modified by cor-el

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It seems to work with the Hardware acceleration disabled. It worked fine before this this enabled. Why doesn't it work now.

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Hi DarkSorrow, one reason you might suddenly need to disable hardware acceleration is after a graphics card driver update that reveals a previously unknown incompatibility.

Does that mean I don't need to try to puzzle through all those crash reports? Fingers crossed.