Firefox Weirdness...

stu w wien33 at cox.net
Tue Mar 10 11:44:09 MST 2009


Greetings All,
	Something happened to me last night while browsing the net with Firefox
that took me by surprise, and being a perpetual noob I thought I'd toss
it up here. I came across a "Scare-ware" site that "scanned" my Ubuntu
8.10 box and found a whole bunch of .exe and .dll nasties. Of course I
realized immediately it was a lame attempt to scare me into buying
something totally useless, but afterward, Firefox Maximized itself to
full-screen, obliterating the toolbars so I couldn't close out of it, or
even shut down the computer.
	I can see how this would be a major problem for a Windows user, but I
simply changed to a terminal and used Top to end the process. Restarting
Firefox and restoring the defaults had no effect on the weirdness,
neither did completely uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox via
Synaptic, (which was unnecessary as well, but gave me a clue as to what
the real issue was). 
	The quick and dirty fix was to delete the .mozilla folder from ~/home,
forcing Firefox to create a new file upon restarting it. That seemed to
fix the issue, except I had to reload all my bookmarks. I have since
backed-up my .mozilla file under a different name in case it happens
again.
	I'm just wondering if there was a simpler/better way to deal with it? I
am running some Windows games and MSIE 6.0 (Misery?) under Wine, if that
makes a difference, but I doubt it.
	Thanks,
	Stu



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