Firefox 12 crashes at first startup and opening preferences on MAC OS X 10.6.8

[Cheeru]

My Macbook pro is running MAC OS X 10.6.8. The new firefox 12 started crashing. I have updated the all the plug-ins but still the crash remains the same. The browser usually crashes when I first open it or when I try to open the preferences, extensions, or add-ons. I don’t know what is causing this. I don’t think that it is due to the extensions, or add-ons. If so, I could have got a error message at start up of Firefox saying that the add-on has crashed or restart the Firefox or something like that. Here it is crashing without any reasons. Actually there are no add-ons and extensions. I have only plug-ins installed and they are:

• QuickTime
• Silverlight
• flip4mac windows media
• Shockwave flash
• SharePoint browser plug-in for Microsoft office.

[Kiran25]

Anyway, did you try creating a new profile by deleting older one?

Are you getting any kind of crash ID? When my Firefox crashed in my Mac, I have got an ID which was associated to the Breakpad crash reporter writing data to a file on disk.

Also delete the %APPDATA%/Mozilla/Firefox/Crash Reports folder and see what you can get. This happens more with software firewalls if they are configured incorrectly due to lack of network knowledge. In the Windows FW is the basic protection (without the user must intervene in the configuration) is sufficient. And finally, in most cases, even the router firewall is active.

[Chachhi]

What operating system that runs it?

If Windows would certainly active malware, a very plausible explanation. Otherwise, you have to check the plugins. Perhaps there has been an outdated plug in. It could be a plug-in that is responsible for Flash content. It should show up just a plugin named "Shockwave Flash" with the current version number. Also there should be no other plugin, the swf is responsible for the MIME type application / x-shockwave-flash and the ending feels. IIRC have old QuickTime versions had such an option. In general, it is necessary to prevent security holes. A good idea is to disable unneeded plug-ins using Add-ons> Plugins> Choose disable.

[Dvimida]

In Windows there are lot of Cleaning tools available to wipe out the outdated or corrupted files, folders, registry entries and other things. This will help you to solve out most of the problems but in Mac I don’t think that there are tuning (cleaning) tools. You don’t see any error at all and then I could assume that it is just a system problem. However I don’t have any idea about the Mac but I have heard that nowadays Macs are infected by viruses and / or malware. This also could be a reason. In the latest version of Mac OS X (codenamed Lion). It included a bug that causes Firefox to crash when a website uses its own fonts. These must be downloaded before the site with the correct font displayed. Mozilla has released the new web font api's already added in the Mac versions of Firefox. So I don’t think that this bug is still survived in the Firefox 12 now.

[Lisa Boney]

Mozilla has a stability update was released for Firefox on Mac OS X, which should prevent the browser crashes. It was a bug in the next Mac OS X 10.7, which caused Firefox to crash when downloadable fonts were used. Something which Mozilla frequently, allowing users with severe crash problems were faced. There is also a solution to a problem that Apple's "Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 5" was introduced, allowing the Java plug-in was not loaded. Although the number of Firefox users on Mac OS X 10.5 through Mozilla is relatively small, the developer decided to fix the problem anyway. Updating can be done via the browser.