I don’t know if I had downloaded a bad build last night of Firefox 3.0.X but Firefox was stuck in ‘perpetual crash mode’. All I did was click a link (safe and trusted) in my Windows Live Mail and Firefox crashed. I restarted Firefox with the same session and it crashed again and again. I started with a fresh session and it crashed again, and again. Well that narrowed it down to either my profile (not a big deal if it got fried) or that particular build.

I fired up Chrome (one of the benefits of having four browsers installed on this machine) and proceeded to download the release version of Firefox 3.1b1. I also pulled up my Windows Live Mail and was able to read the message and click the link without a crash. After installing I was able to launch successfully Firefox 3.1b1 with about 95% of my extensions disabled (this I WAS expecting, just may be not the mass number that had not been bumped up to 3.1 yet). Simple fix, went into my add-ons manager and used the Nightly Tester Tools to force the extensions to install with Firefox 3.1. After restart, Firefox 3.1b1 is running fine with all my extensions.

Well, that narrowed it down to the build then since my profile still seems to be working. Now, I need to play around with Firefox 3.1 a bit and also get myself back on to the Nightlies download channel. I do have to stay that this is the first time in over 2-years working with the Nightly Build that I have ever had a major problem. I’ve run into an occasional strange behaviour or some minor issues but never a fully unstable build. But that is the risk I assume using a nightly build, which is why they are not for the faint of heart.