How do you stop Firefox Back, Forward, and Refresh buttons from becoming greyed/grayed out, and how to recover from it?

This is a well-known problem, a Google search quickly reveals hundreds of hits.

It's so common in fact, that it suffers from "question spam" -- it's IMPOSSIBLE to find the correct solution among all the thousands of postings. I am of course contributing to the problem by posting this now, but I hope SU's community moderated format will help uncover the real answer once and for all :-)

Summary... .

It happens in all operating systems - Linux, Vista, Windows7 are most commonly reported.

Reinstalling Firefox typically does not solve the problem.

It's not caused by any specific plug-in.

The solution involves removing some hard-to-find / elusive file.

link|improve this question

61% accept rate
Does this happen on all tabs? Just one tab? Does it disappear completely? – steve.lippert Jul 16 '10 at 21:06
Can you actually detail the problem. I haven't heard of this. – Daisetsu Jul 17 '10 at 0:34
feedback

2 Answers

Mine are greyed out (back/forward) - but they are supposed to be as I´ve nowhere to go back or forward to in this tab. If you open all links in new tabs that will always be the case. I use a combined stop/reload button but would expect the stop button to be greyed out if you are not downloading data for that tab. The file menu items follow the same pattern.

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 0 down vote accepted

Problem went away as mysteriously as it appeared.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.