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Comment: added troubleshooting steps from bug 754437
Revision 32 as of 2014-09-25 03:03:30
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    strace firefox http://offending_page.url 2> firefox_strace_$(date
+%Y-%b-%d_%H:%M:%S).txt
    strace firefox http://offending_page.url 2> firefox_strace_$(date +%Y-%b-%d_%H:%M:%S).txt

Becoming the greatest browser ever very quickly. Uses the gecko rendering engine from Mozilla but puts it in a light weight and fast new interface.

In DebianSarge, the name of the package containing Firefox is mozilla-firefox

DebianEtch and DebianSid provides only the free fork named Iceweasel. (The dummy package firefox exists to ease transition to iceweasel).

Invoke it using one of the following:

 /usr/bin/firefox

 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox 

or simply

 firefox 

For Gnome launcher, use

 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox "%s"

to open a concrete page.

Plugin

The plugin directory is

  •  /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

for more info on Firefox plugins, refer to the plugins section of the Mozilla page.

It has Javascript enabled by default.

Troubleshooting

  1. My firefox is consistently crashing on a website
  2. First run firefox without loading any extensions and see if the problem persists. This can be done by using the -safe-mode option

    firefox -safe-mode
  • If the problem goes away, then it means that one of the installed extensions is the root cause of the problem. If not then read on!
  • Create a new user and try to reproduce the problem on the new user's account.
  • If there is no problem with firefox on new user's account, chances are that your ~/.mozilla/firefox/ directory is corrupt.
  • In order to see if the ~/.mozilla/firefox is infact corrupt or not, move it to some other directory and start firefox again

    mv ~/.mozilla/firefox ~/old_firefox
    firefox &
  • If firefox (or iceweasel) isn't producing useful error messages on crashing, you may be able to get some error information from strace. Look in the last few lines of the trace file after firefox crashes to see if anything looks odd (e.g. file missing):

    strace firefox http://offending_page.url 2> firefox_strace_$(date +%Y-%b-%d_%H:%M:%S).txt
    strace iceweasel 2> firefox_iceweasel_$(date +%Y-%b-%d_%H:%M:%S).txt
  • Ask for help on debian-user mailing list by providing all the relevant information like "the way to reproduce the crash", "the version of firefox you are using", and "the distribution you are using" etc.
  • Finally, if you are confident that it is a bug in the firefox package please consider filing a bug against firefox package.

See also