Mozilla Mishaps

UPDATE (11 Feb., 2009): With the release of 3.0.6, I thought I'd revisit this post to see if anything had been changed.  While Firefox still has the same bug, at least the Mozilla support forums have been fixed -- you no longer get the obtuse "this forum is flat" error.

Firefox recently warned me that a new version was available and that I should update.  When I'd gotten to a good place to take a break in my work, I restarted Firefox and was greeted with "The update could not be installed.  Please make sure there are no other copies of Firefox running on your computer and then restart Firefox again," and an "OK" button.  Pressing "OK" restarts Firefox, which tries to run the update, which brings up the same message.

The old joke about the computer programmer that died in the shower comes to mind: lather, rinse, repeat.

I won't go into how poorly designed this message is.  (OK, maybe I will.  Perhaps an option to end other Firefox processes?  Perhaps an option to exit?  Perhaps tell us that pressing OK will restart Firefox?)  Instead I'll offer a quick solution if you're running Vista or Windows 7.  For those on XP, I had to reboot my computer.

1. Kill the Firefox process: Bring up Task manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), go to the "Processes" tab, select the "firefox.exe" process, click "End Process" and "End Process" again in the warning dialog.
2. Open the Start Menu, type "firefox" and right-click on the "Mozilla Firefox" entry that appears.
3. Select "Run as Administrator" and "Continue" if the User Account Control dialog comes up (some Vista installs do not have UAC enabled)

To add insult to injury, if you were to try to find a solution at, say, Mozilla's help page, you get zero results.  OK, you say, perhaps Google knows.  So you Google some useful terms and sure enough the first result is from Mozilla's support forum and is titled "Problem opening Firefox - update could not be installed. Stuck in Endless Loop."  Perfect!  Not so fast.  Mozilla's forums are all screwed up and when you follow the link you're greeted with an "Error.  This forum is flat and doesn't allow replies to other replies" message instead.  If you're really savvy, you'll look at Google's cached version of the page (when Google visits a page to index it, it keeps a cached version until the next time in indexes the page).

Everyone else is up the creek and stuck searching for solutions with IE.  Talk about insult and injury!

Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox, but when they screw up, they really screw up. And it's mishaps like this one that keeps Firefox from being everyone's browser of choice.