I fired up my laptop this morning and went to run Firefox as usual, but something wasn’t quite right. The setup dialog box for Tabbrowser Extensions popped up asking me to pick my settings. Odd I thought, so told it import my settings from a backup. Then clicked OK, nothing happening. So I picked one of the default settings, click OK. Nothing again. I hit Escape and Firefox appeared.

Of course the Tabbrowser Extensions hadn’t loaded at all so Firefox looked a mess. So off I went in search of some answers… but then found out I had no search engines listed in the little search drop down top right. Very strange. So I searched the old fashioned way by actually going to Google by typing in the address and everything. My effort was wasted, nothing useful came back. So I uninstalled Firefox and rebooted. No difference.

So I thought this was an ideal chance to try out Firefox 2 Beta 1. Hmmm. No. It looks very spiffy and everything but none of my extensions were compatible (other than Download Statusbar). Feck. Back to 1.5 then. Looks like when I uninstall it leaves bits behind. So how do you completely remove it? Like this apparently! Uninstalling it again and nuking the application data completely (C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\), and then reinstalling it did the trick.

As to what caused it, I’m not sure… but Kate was using it the night before ;)