Question:

I haven’t used Firefox in a while because of a problem I’ve been having. It won’t let me gather any apps. This is the error message:

Could not initialize the application’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your application’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the application and fix the problem. If you continue to use this session, you might see incorrect application behaviour when accessing security features.

Is there any help you can offer me? Thanks.

Answer:

I’m not clear on what you mean when you say “it won’t let me gather apps,” but more than likely you have a corrupt Firefox user profile. To solve the problem, you’ll need to delete every file in your Mozilla installation and do a clean install of the latest version of the browser. Some of these files hide in places you might not think to look, so it’s important to follow directions on how to fully remove profile.

If you’re concerned about losing your bookmarks, etc., I recommend installing Foxmarks (if Firefox will let you install it). Foxmarks synchronizes bookmarks and Web-related logins and passwords among different browsers on one machine as well as on browsers installed on multiple machines. The product and its server-based service, is currently free. And it supports Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. By using Firefox to back up your bookmarks and other user info, you should be able to reinstate that information on your cleanly installed Firefox installation.

Here’s a summary of steps you should take to solve your Firefox problem. This solution will work with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux installations of Firefox:

1. Install Foxmarks and synchronize your user data with the Foxmarks server. You might also want to explore synchronizing your bookmarks with other browsers on your machine or other machines you use. Foxmarks is about to undergo a major upgrade. The product and service is in the process of being renamed Xmarks, with new features and functionality.

2. Download the latest version of Firefox (3.0.7 at this writing) and then uninstall Firefox from your computer.

3. Follow these MozillaZine instructions for removing your Firefox user profile and fully uninstalling the browser.

4. Windows users should restart their machines.

5. Install the new version of Firefox.

6. Install Foxmarks in the new Firefox installation, and use it to resynchronize your bookmarks, ensuring that you use the server-based bookmarks to overwrite your local Firefox bookmarks.

This should solve your problem, and may also make Firefox run faster and/or begin performing other functions that may have also stopped working.

To avoid experiencing a corrupt user profile again, I recommend that you cleanly install every major version of Firefox. In other words, when Firefox 4.0 is released, follow these steps again. You can allow upgrade installations of incremental releases, such as the forthcoming Firefox 3.5 — unless, of course, Mozilla recommends otherwise.

What browser is Scot using?

For those of you keeping score, I reviewed Firefox 3.0 from a Macintosh perspective in this Computerworld story: Firefox 3 for Mac: Is it time to switch from Safari? Among other things, the article didn’t reach a hard conclusion about whether I’d be switching from Safari to Firefox on the Mac. (On Windows, I remain a confirmed Firefox user.) I also talked about why bookmark synchronization was important, and I didn’t select Foxmarks at that time, since it didn’t support Safari at that time.

So let me update those two points:

Safari vs. Firefox: These words from the earlier Computerworld story are the salient ones; they sum up the reason why I have remained a Safari user on the Mac:

There is one downside to Firefox 3, however. The first time you launch it after starting up OS X, Firefox 3 takes 5.5 seconds to open a blank page. By contrast, Safari 3.1.1 takes about half a second for the same task. It’s a noticeable difference.

Bookmark synchronization: Foxmarks offers some of the features of Apple’s MobileMe, and it works with IE, Firefox, and Safari on Windows, Mac, and Linux. MobileMe is a Mac-specific synchronization tool that works very well. It’s also able to synchronize a long list of data on Macs, such as the calendar and address book. I’m a MobileMe subscriber, and I will continue to be. But Foxmarks lets me extend bookmark synchronization to all my Windows machines. For that reason, it is installed on at least half a dozen of my computers. I recommend it highly to anyone who works with multiple computers. It may also be a valuable took to those who regularly use multiple browsers on the same computer.

One feature that might make Foxmarks more useful to some users would be the ability to specify specific parts of your bookmarks to synchronize. It is designed to synchronize all bookmarks. Whoops, I stand corrected. The Profiles feature, which works in conjunction with MyFoxmarks — the server-based version of your bookmarks — does allow you to assign specific bookmarks or bookmark folders to different profile names so as to exclude synchronization of personal bookmarks to your work computer for example, or vice versa. The MyFoxmarks instance of your bookmarks will have the superset of all your bookmarks from all profiles. Thanks to reader Evano for pointing this out.

In the wake of Microsoft’s IE7 update, other key browsers are revving in the near future. Both Apple and Mozilla are planning browser upgrades, and as you by now know, Apple’s Safari will be released for Windows too.

It’s great to see Apple planning new things for its browser, but it needs to make its product more mainstream on the Internet. If nothing else, Web development teams will be able to test to the Windows version of Safari before they release their code to their Web sites. Although in these betas, the Mac and Windows versions of Safari don’t always render Web pages the same way. Perhaps even more important, Apple’s stance that the iPhone display the exact same Web as other computers, and the fact that its browser is, of course, Safari-based, means that the offering of Safari for Windows will help Web development teams the world over inadvertently make Web pages work better on iPhone. Score one for Apple.

That said, the current beta of Safari for Windows isn’t a great Windows product. Hopefully Apple will attempt to pay more attention to Windows conventions before it ships the product. My guess is that it won’t, though. I don’t think Apple is out to dominate the end-user browser market. It has set it sights on winning the mobile market with iPhone. Lower-priced phones are needed to make that a reality, but Cupertino has a chance to do just that. It has definitely leapfrogged the competition with the iPhone. So look at Windows Safari as a building block for that goal, not something that’s truly aimed at browser market share.

One question I still have for Apple (I keep meaning to ask them): Will Safari 3 be released separately for OS X 10.4 Tiger when or around the time that OS X 10.5 Leopard ships (currently expected in October)? Or will you have to upgrade to Leopard to get the new version of Safari? Given the huge public beta running on Tiger, one hopes that Apple doesn’t stiff its user base on that. The same question applies to Boot Camp, by the way.

In case you haven’t noticed, Mozilla has offered its Alpha 6 release of Firefox 3. You’ll find information and download links for Windows, Mac, and Linux on the Release Notes page. Please read this entire document before installing the Firefox 3 alpha to avoid issues with your current Firefox installation. This Mozilla Firefox 3 Milestone Schedule appears to be the most up-to-date roadmap for Firefox 3. It was last updated on July 9th, as I write this.

It projects one more alpha release at the end of July. Unlike some previous major Firefox efforts, Mozilla appears to be doing more work in the alpha phase. So the notes project that alpha 7 will represent a feature freeze (feature complete) build. So, while they might still tweak features, they’re not expecting to add any features in the beta phase. With the first beta they’re projecting to freeze the user interface of the browser. The wording allows a little wiggle room to add some smaller features at the last minute into the first beta.

Mozilla’s project planners expect the two betas to be released on September 18 and October 16. From past experience, Mozilla’s roadmap is just an estimate. It’s what its engineers hope to do. They make no promises about dates, and that’s as it should be. It does appear that the open-source development team expects to release the shipping version of Firefox 3 some time in November of this year.

I’m not going to try to fathom the features in Firefox 3 for this little story, but if you want to wade through the Mozilla documents yourself, I’d start here, and I’d also look at this page.

For some Mac users, Safari seems a little lackluster and Firefox lacks Mac-specific fit and finish. Those people may adopt the Camino browser, a Mac-only program based on the same Gecko browser engine the powers Firefox. There’s a lot to like about Camino, but the big problem for me is that it doesn’t support extensions. Until recently, it was also using the Firefox 1.5 browsing engine instead of the newer Gecko 1.8.1 Firefox 2 engine. Camino was recently updated to version 1.5, though, and that problem is solved. Camino 1.5 also picks up many of the Firefox 2 features, such Web-based spelling, feed detection, session restore, and upgraded tabbed browsing. (See Camino 1.5 Release Notes for more details.)