Firefox problems: bookmarks toolbar; opening the browser; gmail won't load
I’ve been struggling with 3 problems with Firefox for about a month. They’ve been driving me nuts!
[Image Source: http://www.enviroaction.com.au/your-procedures-etc.html]
First, my Bookmarks Toolbar has been disappearing and the “back” button has been inaccessible. Tonight I had to either find a way to fix this problem or go back to an earlier version or FF that actually worked. Fortunately, I discovered a patch at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11325. My gratitude goes out to Alice 0775 in Osaka, Japan for her work on this problem.
Second, I have been getting a message that “Firefox is already running …” that will not go away until I either log off or shut down & restart.
I found 3 articles about this common complaint:
Having skimmed through a lot of technical language I didn’t really understand, I picked what seemed to be the easiest fix to try first and installed the newest version of Java. The problem seems to have been fixed for now – but if you’re seeing more typos than usual in this post, it’s because I’m keyboarding with my fingers crossed.
Now I’m wondering why Voicethread doesn’t work very well in Firefox. I find occasionally that I have to switch to IE to get some applications to function properly. A case in point is my Wilkes University Wordpress student blog. When I first set it up, other students could see everything (in FF) but the professor could not. I found I had to access it from IE and then write and edit it from there. Then it could be seen in any browser.
Finally, I my gmail account has been loading either very slowly or not at all. Sending a short gmail with no attachements can take up to a minute (sending . . . . sending . . . sending . . . ). I thought it was because the inbox was overstuffed, but according to the message at the bottom of the page I’m using only 26 mb (0%) of the 7363 mb available to me.
Tonight I tried it in Internet Explorer. It worked smoothly and fast!! I don’t want to keep switching browsers, and Firefox has been my first choice for quite a while, so determined to stick with it, I went back to it and tried another route in. Instead of working my way through the menu,
I tried Googling ‘gmail’ and used the first link. This worked really well, but I have no idea why.
Now 2 more issues are baffling me:
- I can’t upload most videos to Voicethread in FF, although they go up fine in IE. I’ve followed the VT instructions for formatting (converted to flv files; 600x450; 15 fps; increased the bit rate to get to medium quality), but they just will not load in Firefox. As soon as I switch to Internet Explorer, everything works beautifully and my Voicethread account page seems to be generally more stable. Does anyone know why?
- Last of all, Firefox doesn’t seem to want to keep me signed into my Google account. Is it time to switch to a new browser?
