After my earlier Firefox Lorentz Beta Released post, I noticed something didn’t seem quite right with my Firefox nightly build. For one thing I had not seen the Mozilla Runtime Environment (mozilla-runtime.exe) kicking in for Flash sites. I also kept noticing that every time I would get an update offer I was being informed Chrome Edit Plus add-on was not compatible and would be disabled. Also each time thought I had updated when Firefox restarted I would get an updated noticed for 3.6.4pre but when I went to install I would get an error about not being able to find the license. Checking in Help and About Namoroka still showed the 3.6.3pre nightly from around March 24th.

No matter how many times I tried to apply the update to 3.6.4pre and restarted Firefox, it would not apply. At first I thought may be Comodo Firewall was blocking the installation but my Shredder (Thunderbird 3 developmental) updates were being installed just fine. Okay, crossed the firewall off the list of suspects. Next thought was may be the Chrome Edit Plus extension was not getting disabled and this somehow was preventing the update from installing. From within the add-ons manager, went ahead and disabled the extension then restarted Firefox. Once again tried to apply the update without success.

Okay at this point it must have had something to do with that particular nightly build (the joys of nightly builds). I really didn’t want spend a bunch of time looking through old posts in the mozillaZine Firefox Builds forum so I would try one more thing. I downloaded Firefox 3.6.3 then closed Firefox. Went into the Windows Control Panel to uninstall, but this install was not listed. So into Windows Explorer and manually removed this Firefox 3.6 nightly install. Installed Firefox 3.6.3 and then did a check for updates. Since my profile was still intact and my update channel is ‘nightly’, got offered the latest nightly for 3.6.4pre. After installing the update then restarting, I saw a screen I have not seen in a long time, ‘updates are being installed’ screen. Well, that was a good sign. Further Comodo was throwing an alert firefox.exe has changed, another good sign. Once Firefox restarted, I knew things were good when I saw in the title bar Lorentz and About Lorentz shows in the Help Menu.

Upon entering my WordPress Dashboard which has a flash applet for blog traffic, mozilla-runtime.exe kicked in (with a warning from Comodo Firewall). Also, the title bar and the border around the Firefox application have turned blue. I took a look in System Explorer and saw underneath firefox.exe was the mozilla-runtime.exe and like Percy mentioned on average it is using about an additional 10% of the memory Firefox is using.

Still have no idea why I was stuck on that old nightly. I did take brief look around in the mozillaZine Firefox Builds forum to see if this was a common problem. Apparently not. Did find an interesting thread with an explanation for name change from Namoroka to Lorentz.