Help me oh internets, you're my only hope!

[miss_s_b]

My mum is having a weird firefox problem. It crashes when she tries to look at a shopping basket on any internet shopping site. It totally shuts itself down and you get the "firefox has encountered a problem" thing. Two virus checkers have found no threats, and my instinct is it's something she's done to the security settings. The problem is that mum is not the most computer literate person in the world, and trying to get her to describe the problem was difficult enough; trying to get her to tell me if she's clicked a security option will be impossible...

I have checked everything I can think of, and Mat can't think of anything. Have any of you lot got any ideas?

Comments

[innerbrat]

I can't help with diagnosis, but I can offer a possible solution to 'getting her to describe the problem'.

[miss_s_b]

I have tried all that and found that the only solution is to visit mother's house and get her to show me. Part of the problem is that she uses technical terms wrongly, and gets offended when you tell her that a word doesn't mean what she is using it to mean.

[innerbrat]

OH. You mean she's a PARENT. You'd think I'd know this, I have two of my own.

Sorry, no idea.

(Hahah, that's you in thirty years *ducks*)

[miss_s_b]

Oh Cthulhu, that last line was below the belt. Anyway, my dad reckons Mat is turning into her to save me the bother.

[innerbrat]

Crap, it was. I'm sorry.

FIREFOX problems

[(Anonymous)]

Is she using the latest version of FIREFOX?

Some people with crashing problems have solved them by upgrading. If her version is really old it may be an incompatibity problem with the latest webpage software.

Some tech information on common crashes at this webpage

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes

Edis

[karohemd]

Have you opened the site yourself on your computer/connection and added something to the shopping basket? Might be a problem with the site.

[miss_s_b]

It's not just one site, it's all shopping sites. You can add things to baskets fine, but as soon as you try to look at baskets, boom, it dies.

[innerbrat]

Is it the https: connection?

[miss_s_b]

No, cos I'm fine on Gmail.

[innerbrat]

I tried some goodle searches and I keep being sent back to this blog post. Internet fail.

Can I assume you've tried disabling all add-ons?

(Sorry about the 'is it plugged in?' questions)

[miss_s_b]

I haven't actually disabled ALL, no, although I have tried the likely candidates. Will give that a go.

[miss_s_b]

Still does it with all add-ons disabled

[innerbrat]

My weird searches are even throwing things up like saved passwords causing issues. IDEK.

[miss_s_b]

Thanks for being a sounding board anyway.

* hug *

[karohemd]

Very odd.

[crustofthegrouch.blogspot.com]

That's really odd, could be a java add on, when Firefox upgrades I don't believe that gets updated. I've had problems like that before, when there are different versions of add-ons in use.

[heartroutine]

I was having that exact problem on my last computer, and on this one when I first installed everything. In both cases it was actually a fault with one of the memory sticks.

Does your mum get any random restarts or blue screens?

Firefox Down

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have any details but IO read on a webmaster forum Firefox foundation were screaming that they were coming under cyber attack today.

That would explain a lot. If it doesn't clear up visit me at http://greenteeth.blog.co.uk and leave a personal message with details of the problem and I'll see what I can find out.

Someone said upgrade to latest version. That's a good idea if the machine and operating system will support it.

Good luck, Ian Thorpe

[bagpuss]

To discover where the problem is I would be tempted to suggest 2 things, disable all add ons and delete all cookies and/or install another browser to see if the problem goes away and it is does it definitely a firefox problem rather than a problem with settings external to firefox