For the third time now, my Firefox installation is more or less completely messed up. And every time now it had to do with extensions. And every time now it has been almost impossible to find the offending extension and get it all cleaned up again. I browsed the net, but all I found were occasional problems with individual extensions, but no reports about unstable setups caused by extension conflicts. I wonder if I am the only one…
I really like Firefox. I believe in its concept. I believe in the community. But – and this sentence really hurts – I never faced problems like this with Internet Explorer. I never needed to reinstall IE – actually I don’t know if it is possible at all. The only time I ever messed up my IE install was when I tried to install an English IE version in parallel to my German IE version.
Of course I’m not “Joe User”. I use quite a lot of extensions:
- Add Bookmark Here
- Adsense Notifier
- Bookmarks Synchronizer
- ChromEdit
- Disable Targets For Downloads
- Ext2File
- Favorites Converter (export)
- FirefoxView
- Flat Bookmark Editing
- GeoURL
- Gmail Notifier
- Google Pagerank Status
- googlebar
- ieview
- Live HTTP Headers
- MeasureIt
- PubSub Sidebar
- SEOpen
- Sort Extensions
- SpoofStick
- SwitchProxy Tool
- Tweak Network
- User Agent Switcher
- Web Developer
- Yahoo! Toolbar
That’s probably more than is healthy for my FF install, but – hey – it’s supposed to be good and stable and kick ass. And not to simply crash when some of the extensions collide!
The recent issue came up when I upgraded to 1.0.4 – after that FF started to act up again. Knowing the drill already, I deinstalled all the extensions and left only my essentials (Bookmarks Synchronizer, Add Bookmark Here, ChromEdit, Flat Bookmark Editing, Gmail Notifier, ieview) – and I got it back working – except for the Bookmark Synchronizer, which is unfortunately my most essential one since I use on 3 different PC’s.
What wonders me most is that some extension don’t really uninstall. Ext2File – an extensions which writes a list of installed extension to a text file – uninstalls but is STILL present. And don’t even think about trying to manually tamper with the installed extensions on (config-)file level – all I managed by doing so is messing it up further, or losing ALL extensions!
There should be an “Extension Doctor” extension, which diagnoses, cleans up, repairs and allows you to chirurgically delete extensions.
So, am I the only one having (repeat) trouble with conflicting extensions? Any help?