Is this the end, the final death throw for Firefox?

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Hi all

Thank as always to Woody’s world for a great  forum & newsletter.

I have a the sense of a sad ending with my long, long relationship with Mozilla and it’s bushy tailed red fox, and I say this with a sense of deep sadness.

If you guys can tease out an answer, then maybe we can stagger on for a while longer, I would be so (in equal measure), so surprised and delighted if you could.

I’m looking at the screen in the attachment when I try to open gmail ~ ‘We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable‘  Only, it’s not as the dashboard shows.

Gmail is opening with no problems on

• Chrome;
• Edge;
• My mobile;
• The tablet;
• And on other browsers on my Surface pro.

Only gmail, mind … all the other apps are opening normally

 

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In years past I’ve used whichever browser worked most reliably for me, with the most protective, configurable amounts of anti-surveillance capitalism setups I can manage, and then loaded them with anti-tracking plug-ins and extensions. They have included Internet Exploder, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Edge and its new version, and lately Brave is my go-to browser. Firefox has had consistently decreasing reliability over time for me, and I have stopped using it, as I found with Opera.

Human, who sports only naturally-occurring DNA ~ oneironaut ~ broadcaster

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Cyril Souchon

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Michael,

I would like to ask related to your statement, ” In years past I’ve used whichever browser worked most reliably for me ” and then you have used ” included Internet Exploder, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Edge and its new version, and lately Brave is my go-to browser. Firefox has had consistently decreasing reliability over time for me, and I have stopped using it, as I found with Opera. ”

Of all these programs that you have gone to the trouble to learn and adjust to your needs,  have you provided your experiences to your Blog for the benefit of others ?  Also, have you contributed funds to all those Browser program’s support and development ! ? ?

Regards,

xNavy73Dp

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I just logged into my GMail account using Firefox 78.5.0esr (64-bit) in my CentOS 7 VM. I opened my inbox, read, and deleted an email all with no issue.

I only use Firefox in my Linux VMs and that’s not with any regularity. I would guess there is something wrong with the Firefox profile on the machine that won’t open GMail. Sorry I can’t offer any more than that.

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M. Paquet, Cyril Souchon

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I log in and am on Gmail all day in Firefox 83 with no problems.

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Northwest Rick

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[PaulK]

Which version of Firefox are you on now?
Has this ALWAYS been a problem on Firefox? – or –
Did this ‘used to work’ on Firefox?
— If so, what version?
When did this problem start?
What, if any: Addons / Plugins / Extensions are on Firefox?

Edit addition, as others have posted as I was keying this —
As suggested that there may be a Profile problem:
— Create a new Profile, and try there.
Profile analysis and clean-up is another matter.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by PaulK.

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Cyril Souchon

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Paul, hi. version 83.0

It started two days ago.

I’ve been using FF almost since its inception, I should say.

I’ve cleared the system of most traces: re-installed FF from the ground up (i.e deleted the folders in the APPDATA folder – Local & Roaming before reinstalling), and of course without any add-ons. the only thing I didn’t do was fiddle with the registry.

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Firefox 83.0 on my Windows 10 20H2 laptop and desktop is working fine here. It still searches with the address bar using DuckDuckGo or StartPage or Wikipedia engines. The Gmail addon in the FF toolbar works and takes me directly to the Gmail account like usual.

If FF becomes problematic, I’ll switch to Vivaldi as my main browser with VivaldiMail and VivaldiCalendar, owned and designed by private contributors led by former Opera cofounder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and contributor Tatsuki Tomita. Their HQ and offices are in Norway, Iceland and the US.

Win10 Pro 20H2,backups with Macrium Reflect home edition

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Cyril Souchon

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Please try clearing the cache as this can still fix plenty of illogical issues.

To completely clear the cache, enter the following text as you see it in the address bar:
about:blank

about:blank causes Firefox to render a blank page.

Control+Shift+Delete is the direct method to open dialog box:

For the time range, usually clearing Everything is the best option. (If you know of a time when it started, try the others times in the list.) Uncheck everything except Cache, double check that only the Cache will be deleted, and click OK.

Did this step help you?

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**solved**

thanks to all who responded

The solution in the end was to also delete the registry entries under ‘Mozilla‘ at ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software‘ after the uninstall and removing the AppData folders. Pulling the folders deletes the profiles & cache, of course ~ so I’m surprised that wasn’t enough.

Very curious,  so this doesn’t really make any sense to me – but hey – it worked so I’m not going to spend more time trying to understand it.

After I’d re-installed, I went back to my November month-end backups and restored the AppData folders. gmail continued to work ok, so it was clearly a corruption that happened in the ten or so days after December 1.

Regards to all 🙂

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Mr. Austin, Northwest Rick, SueW

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Firefox has a lot of forks such as Palemoon and a fork of Palemoon is MyPal which I currently use since it’s the only browser that continue to get updates for WinXP which I use as a sandbox. Just wish there was a fork of Chrome that still updates for XP but there isn’t one. So long as you have die hard fans of WinXP, you’ll definitely see Firefox remain relevant. 🙂

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Firefox is my preferred browser. I associate it with “personal computing” and “open source”. I don’t use Gmail because I have been using yahoo mail – for years, because of flickr.com. I have nothing against Gmail – but I do prefer to support open source Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, and Perl 5. I guess “personal computing” dates me. I guess “open source” dates me. I wish Mozilla could figure out a way to depend less on Google Search.

Happy Holidays. Stay healthy.

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Fabled, Northwest Rick

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I’ve just had the same experience with Firefox 83 but…after getting the Google Workspace Stats, I hit the BACK button and my mail appeared by magic and after turning FF83 on and off multiple times as well as my desktop machine many times the problem never showed up again; so go figure, but since it does not appear to be broke anymore, I’ve stopped worrying.
Hope that works for you as abandoning FF is like waving good bye to an old friend and leaving for parts unknown.
Cheers
Henri

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Northwest Rick

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The clickbait header of this topic is unfortunate. Sounds like a baby/bathwater solution to me.

I never run Gmail or anything Google or YouTube in my own FF, simply because I don’t want to give their links a pass in NoScript. On those occasions when I want to access those (I maintain a Gmail account only as a throw-away, to test suspected sources of spam before they contaminate my main Hotmail account) I use Brave as Michael Austin does, thought I have a beef with Brave as well: it does not allow blocking or even delaying updates, so is worse than both FF and Win10 (pariah edition) in that respect.

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gwt10, HiFlyer

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The header is indeed clickbait. The solution to Mr. Souchon’s complaint is to discontinue use of Gmail. Google is a reprehensible, Orwellian presence on the web. One would hope that after a deconstruction of Facebook, Congress would begin to examine the devious practices and colossal ubiquity of Google (Alphabet), AWS and other juggernauts of data capitalism.

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HiFlyer

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Northwest Rick wrote:

The clickbait header of this topic is unfortunate. Sounds like a baby/bathwater solution to me.

I never run Gmail or anything Google or YouTube in my own FF, simply because I don’t want to give their links a pass in NoScript. On those occasions when I want to access those (I maintain a Gmail account only as a throw-away, to test suspected sources of spam before they contaminate my main Hotmail account) I use Brave as Michael Austin does, thought I have a beef with Brave as well: it does not allow blocking or even delaying updates, so is worse than both FF and Win10 (pariah edition) in that respect.

Go into Task Manager and see if any new tasks have been added in there.  If you see a Brave task, disable it.  If you delete it, Brave will just add a new one on the next update.

Go into services.msc and look for a Brave instance auto running.  Switch it to manual.  Don’t turn it off because you’ll still need to update it in the future.

That way you’ll be able to update on your own time and not Brave’s

PS: If you have MS Edge, do the same thing.  I update Edge on my own time as well.  I also make it a habit to check Task Manager every month or so to see if somebody pulled a slick willie in there.  I don’t totally trust any of ’em.

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My very useful set up is thus:  Palemoon Portable running on a flash drive, sandboxed.   have been doing this for years with zero problems.  Palemoon has great extensions that work and sandboxie pro has been perfect.  I have firefox, and opera and safari and vivaldi….but none work as well.  two people, two desktops, 18 hours a day between us online doing everything under the sun…zero problems, everything works….so simple and safe.

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HiFlyer

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re: 2319766 ” Palemoon Portable running on a flash drive, sandboxed.”

Sounds great can you expand the info a bit for this non-tech.   I’d like to try it.  HF

 

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I too received error messages using FF from Google, but that is not the end of it. I attempted to use Opera, Chrome, Edge and the Samsung Internet and had the exact same error messages with all. There was a system update that did change many different things this week and may not mean anything other then a temporary ‘website down for maintenance’ condition. That said however, I have noticed many times that FF is a little, up to much, slower on website then is the Chrome and Edge browsers as well as the a little slower then Opera and Samsung Internet. This may be due to the bias the website have to Chromium browser (which Edge uses), instead of the basic http:// language used by FF.

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