Yesterday I upgraded to Firefox 1.5.0.1. Everything seemed fine. This morning though I can’t open any window without getting this error message:<\/p>\n
XML Parsing Error: no element found\r\nLocation: chrome:\/\/browser\/content\/browser.xul\r\nLine Number 1, Column 1:<\/pre>\n
\nSurprisingly even reinstalling Firefox doesn’t help. Neither does rebooting the machine. However logging in as a different user does fix the problem and allow me to run Firefox, but when I log back in as my usual self I get this error message again. That suggests it’s a preferences problem. I hid the Library\/Mozilla folder but that didn’t fix anything. Let’s try hiding Library\/Preferences\/org.mozilla.firefox.plist. Nope, that doesn’t fix anything either. <\/p>\nAh, wait a minute. The Firefox preferences aren’t the same place the Mozilla prefs are. They’re in Library\/Application Support\/Firefox instead of Library\/Mozilla. Let’s try getting rid of that. Ok. That seems to have something to do with it. Now Firefox will start. Surprisingly after the moving the old Profile back, everything works again. I can’t explain it; but the solution to this problem seems to be:<\/p>\n
\n
- Quit Firefox<\/li>\n
- Rename Library\/Application Support\/Firefox to Library\/Application Support\/Firefox2<\/li>\n
- Launch Firefox<\/li>\n
- Quit Firefox<\/li>\n
- Move Library\/Application Support\/Firefox to the trash<\/li>\n
- Rename Library\/Application Support\/Firefox2 to Library\/Application Support\/Firefox<\/li>\n
- Launch Firefox<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Oops. That fix appears to be only temporary. Now it’s doing it again. OK. Let’s think about the error message for a minute. What is it telling me? It appears to say that in the file browser\/content\/browser.xul there’s no root element. (Side note: I can probably figure this out, but there’s no excuse for showing this message to an end user. You shouldn’t need to have written a dozen books about XML just to use a web browser.) Where might that be? I don’t see any such file, but I do see that the Profile contains a chrome folder. This contains an overlayinfo folder, which contains browser folder, which contains a content folder. However this does not contain a browser.xul file. Maybe it’s missing? Once again, let’s try renaming the Firefox folder, so it will create a new profile.<\/p>\n
Hmm, that did not create the missing file; but it didn’t create overlayinfo\/browser\/content either? Maybe I can just delete that folder. Let’s hide it and see what happens. Nothing. Same problem as before.<\/p>\n
Oh wait. Looks like there are more chrome directories in the extensions folder. Let’s try hiding them. OK, that seems to have worked. Will it stick? Yes, I can quit and relaunch Firefox. And adding them back reproduces the problem. So I’m reasonably confident I’ve isolated the problem to the extensions. <\/p>\n
The next obvious question is which extension caused the problem. I have quite a few: Web Developer, AdBlock, XForms, Sage, Tab Downloader, GreaseMonkey, and Customize Google. I could try adding them back one by one, but I don’t really have the energy for that right now. I will keep an eye on this in the future. <\/p>\n
Anyone have any idea what’s going on here? This bug<\/a> might be relevant, but then again might not be. I’ve filed my own bug<\/a> addressing the user interface issues, leaving aside the root cause of the problem. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I upgraded to Firefox 1.5.0.1. Everything seemed fine. This morning though I can’t open any window without getting this error message: XML Parsing Error: no element found Location: chrome:\/\/browser\/content\/browser.xul Line Number 1, Column 1:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-development","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}