Firefox seems to be “breaking”

Question

I'm beginning to see some strange behavior in Firefox, and I fear that some data may have become corrupt. Here are the symptoms I'm experiencing that I do not see on fresh installs of Firefox on other computers:

1) Some heavily AJAX-based sites like Facebook and TV.com just stop working... I click on something that returns AJAX (like logging in at TV.com or performing any action on Facebook)

2) The status bar doesn't seem to be as responsive. Firebug will not open anymore from double-clicking on the status bar, and the GMail manager takes almost a full 10 seconds to respond (open a new tab).

I'm thinking that I need to completely remove and reinstall Firefox, and that I'll need to backup bookmarks and history. My question are my extensions - can I back these up, or do I have to re-download and reinstall them?

If anyone knows anything about this issue I'm having and knows a solution whereby I don't have to reinstall, I'd love to hear it.

Answer 1

FEBE allows you to backup your entire profile.

FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions. In fact, it goes beyond just backing up -- It will actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files. Now you can easily synchronize your office and home browsers.

But that might not work, in my experience this sort of thing is usually a problem with one of the Firefox addons. To find out if this is the case disable all your addons and see if the problem remains, if it does then a reinstall might help.

If it works without any addons you'll have to figure out whitch addon is broken. My suggestion is to do a binary search (enabling half of the (remaining) addons at a time)