Many people seem to have stability issues with Firefox under Ubuntu – I seemed to be getting problems in the last few months with firefox-bin consuming way too much CPU and sending Xorg through the roof at random intervals. This appears to have come along since upgrading to Lucid Lynx (10.04) Kubuntu.
One solution that I’ve recently tried, and with some success, after reading some forum posts suggested that a corrupted profile could cause this, is to remove ~/.mozilla and let Firefox re-create it.
The issue I had with this is that I’m a lazy bookmarker and rely quite heavily on my browsing history for URL’s that I would otherwise not remember, so I followed the following quick steps to re-create the .mozilla directory but keep my history in tact.
Back up places.sqlite
# cd ~/.mozilla/firefox
# cd ye8hxxo.default
( Replace the above folder with whatever your profile is called )
# mv places.sqlite /tmp
# cd ~
# rm -rf .mozilla
Start and stop Firefox
.mozilla should now be re-created, and a new profile directory created within in it.
Restore places.sqlite
# cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/
# cd ju7ye66.default
(as above, replace the above folder with the profile name)
# mv /tmp/places.sqlite .
Start Firefox
So far, fingers crosssed, I’ve noticed a substantial stability increase and Firefox is running more reliably than it has in months.
