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firefox will not start

  • 3 replies
  • 17 have this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by Wikiwide

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i click on the icon on my dock for firefox and it bounces up like other apps do when they start up, but then it just stops. it doesnt even show up on the activity monitor under active processes.

This happened

Every time Firefox opened

when i downloaded the program

User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.30 Safari/532.5

i click on the icon on my dock for firefox and it bounces up like other apps do when they start up, but then it just stops. it doesnt even show up on the activity monitor under active processes. == This happened == Every time Firefox opened == when i downloaded the program == == User Agent == Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.30 Safari/532.5

All Replies (3)

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Here are the solutions found by googling, try them one-by-one.


First. Try running Firefox in Safe Mode. What will occur?

Somebody said the solution to this problem is:

1. Enter Firefox in Safe Mode (option + click Firefox) 2. Disable 1Password add-on if installed. 3. Close and relaunch! 4. Done!

Firefox should be able to start normally.


I really hope it helps.

If it doesn't help and if Firefox does start in Safe Mode, just disable all add-ons. Update Flash, Java, anything you can update. Then try running Firefox in usual mode with all add-ons disabled and all plug-ins updated and disabled.

Second. Try uninstalling (completely) and reinstalling Firefox.

Third. For What It's Worth, I was having the same problem: FF 3.6.3 starting, icon bouncing in the dock a few times, then nothing. However, I just ran FireFox from the disk image: it successfully ran, and now my installed version of FireFox works fine. Not sure why this would have made any difference, but it did.

Last. As a last resort, you could do clean reinstall of Mac OS X, but I wish we find another solution.

Some links: https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+crashes+when+you+open+it

https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/for.../590191

https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/for.../562036

P.S. It's easier for me to have OS crash, than to have Firefox crash, even if it is Minefield.

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I would not go as far as to reinstall the Mac OS X just because one browser won't start correctly.

There is a Firefox bug filed on this but unfortunately no one has been able to review the patch that attempts to correct this problem. So that is causing a delay in getting the fix checked in then sent into the next version of Firefox.

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Here the bug is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=551152


I don't mean that a clean reinstall is needed. I want to say, that as clean reinstall will definitely solve the problem, the problem is solvable, and then it should be possible to find a solution without a clean reinstall of OS.


In my previous post, I listed the solutions which purportedly helped different people to solve this problem. Maybe, they will help here; maybe, they will not. I don't know.

Just try everything: running Firefox in Safe Mode (option+click), running Firefox from a disk, running Firefox with Profile Manager, uninstalling Firefox and reinstalling it (maybe, 3.5.9 version).

If anything moves from the dead point, write here.