In the meantime, I’ve just updated the Mac A-List, which tracks the best software for the Mac according to Scot. It’s a significant update with several additions and subtractions. Among other things, what do I use with Twitter? Find out. And now that I’ve tested VMware’s Fusion to go along with my examinations of VirtualBox and Parallels, how did that turn out? One of those three is not on the Mac A-List.

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.

I made a backup of my Tiger installation just prior to performing the upgrade and was able to boot to the backup without difficulty. I also used Disk Utility (the Mac’s onboard disk integrity check and repair tool) to check both of the partitions on the computer’s hard drive. Everything checked out, so I went ahead with the upgrade.

As detailed earlier, I ran into the hanging blue screen after installation on the first restart that many other Leopard upgraders experienced. Many people had reported that the problem cleared up for them when they followed one of two methods for removing a Mac OS X customization utility by Unsanity called Application Performance Enhancement (APE). I didn’t have APE installed on my system, but it had been there and uninstalled with leave-behinds. I used Target disk mode to access the hard drive and remove the offending files. That didn’t solve my problem, so I decided to resort to my backup. So I removed the same offending files there just to be safe, wiped my boot volume, and copied my backup to the boot volume. During the copy process I got the error message that I didn’t have rights to copy three or four unnamed files — a message that made no real sense. And it was at that point that I knew I was in for it.

All attempts to reboot into the backup were met with a nasty kernel panic, and none of the boot option key commands worked. So I was out of luck, and I’ll never know for sure what caused the blue screen on that computer. But I did find and fix the probable cause of my backup problem. But first I had to successfully install Leopard.

I decided to perform a clean install of Leopard and then use Apple’s Migration Assistant utility to copy all my data and programs over to Leopard. I’ve used this tool before, and it works exceedingly well. It’s probably the best way for people to upgrade to Leopard, in fact. You get the benefits of a clean install without losing your data. If you’re a .mac subscriber, it’s completely painless, since .mac lets you transfer bookmarks, logins, calendars, address book, mail, and other things from one Mac to another. This time my Leopard installation went off without a hitch. I was able to import all my user data and programs from the flawed Tiger backup without causing any problems whatsoever. I was a happy camper. My only concern was why I had run into trouble.

I decided to run various diagnostics again, and an intersesting thing happened. When I ran Leopard’s version of Disk Utility, it quickly found and fixed a pretty large problem with the primary boot partition. I can only surmise that the disk problem created some sort of corruption with my backup set.

Footnote: The disk partition on this computer was created with an older version of iPartition by Coriolis Software, which is on my A-List of Mac Software. Some readers have written to tell me that iPartition has created problems on their hard drives similar to the one I experienced — although I’m not blaming iPartition for this problem. There are too many other possibilities. (The partition was created about a year ago.) But I am testing a product called Drive Genius that offers partitioning functionality, and I will report on that in the future.

If you read through the thread (as well as many others on other forums), you’ll find that various things are blamed for the problem, including an add-on customization utility called Application Enhancement (APE) by Unsanity.

The Apple Discussion thread offers a solution that involves booting in single-user mode, which requires you to hold down the S key while your Mac boots. Apparently that works for some people, but on my MacBook Pro 15, the only boot option that worked at all was Target Disk Mode (which lets you plug in a firewire cable and address the drive from another Mac as if it were an external drive).

This story and information about solving the problem is evolving over this weekend as I write this post. Some resources that may help people in this situation:

• Computerworld: Finger-pointing over Leopard blue screens heats up
• Computerworld: Some Leopard upgraders see ‘blue screen of death’
• Apple Help Document: “Blue screen” appears after installing Leopard and restarting
• Apple Help Doc: About the Archive and Install feature

My situation is complicated by the fact that there are permissions issues with my backup (taken right before the first attempted Leopard installation) that are making it difficult for me to restore that backup. I had no trouble booting to my backup after it was created. (I used SuperDuper to make the backup.)

My plan is to clean-install Leopard and use the Apple Migration tool to rebuild the computer’s environment. This is probably the smartest way to upgrade anyway. I opted not to do it to test Apple’s upgrade process.

While Apple appears to be laying the blame on Unsanity’s APE software, Unsanity says that’s not possible (see first Computerworld story listed above). So there’s more to this story likely yet to come.

As it happens, at one time I did have the APE product installed on my system, but I uninstalled it a long while back. But in examining the backup now, I have found APE leave-behinds. It’s not clear whether those files and folders are the cause of my problems, though. If I could properly restore my backup, I’d be able to test it. Perhaps I’ll get the chance later.

To be continued.

At Computerworld, we’ve put together the quintessential examination of the new Apple OS commonly referred to as Leopard. Check out: In Depth: Apple’s Leopard Leaps to New Heights. Be sure to check out the First Look at Leopard Image Gallery for a complete visual tour of the new OS, complete with a screencam of the Stacks feature.

I like Leopard. The new OS X has over 300 new features according to Apple (I didn’t stop to count them). There are literally oodles of small tweaks and changes. Things like, when you select Shut Down from the Apple menu, the new default countdown time is 60 seconds, not two minutes. (Yeah, I went for something pretty mundane that you probably haven’t read in a hundred other Leopard reviews.)

A new built-in Mac backup system, Time Machine, is probably the single best new aspect of OS X 10.5. The new virtual desktop functionality, called Spaces, is another noticeable addition. But to sum up Leopard, more than anything it’s a significant usability upgrade both to the operating system’s control surfaces and the bundled applications that come with it.

When you look at it on paper, though Steve Jobs might bristle at this, Leopard is very much like the kind of refinement Microsoft attempted with Vista. To get there, though, Microsoft had a lot farther to come.

I’ll have more to say about Leopard when I’ve had more time with it. The main purpose of this post is give you advice about whether to buy it.

Sooner or later, this is an upgrade most Mac OS X users will want. There’s enough benefit and improvement to pay the money. (Apple’s system requirements specify at least a PowerPC G4 processor running at 867MHz or faster. All Intel-based Macs support Leopard.)

But like any new operating system, this one may have cause some problems with application compatibility, drivers, and interface customization software, such as kernel extensions. (For example, I use DoubleCommand because I like having keyboard buttons on my MacBook Pro that delete both to the left and the right. Call me crazy. But once you work this way, it’s seems silly not to continue. DoubleCommand lets you reassign the functions of some keys.) I don’t expect that it will take very long for most actively updated software products to have updates for Leopard. Most software probably won’t need it anyway. Some hardware products might be a different story. I still find support for the Mac to be weak from many major printer manufacturers, for example.

For new Mac users, little issues with a new version of OS X are nothing like the annoyances and frustrations that some people face with a new version of Windows (Vista definitely included). But it’s a computer; a new operating system may cause some ripples here and there.

Most hard-core Mac users are either planning to line up at Apple stores on Friday evening or wishing they were. My advice is to hang back at least a couple of weeks or months. Make sure everything you use regularly is going to work after your upgrade. Tiger is a fine OS. You can’t even use Time Machine without connecting an external storage device (like a USB drive) or devoting a sizable partition on your hard drive. Don’t get me wrong, Time Machine is a great utility. Every OS should have this functionality. But it’s not really compelling OS content.

For some of us, half the fun is being among the first to use a new version of the Mac OS even if that means coming across some minor issues. If that describes you, there’s no reason not to go for it.