Recovering in 30 Minutes
is good time if you're recovering from a systems failure, but what about recovering from a browser failure?

THEN, it would be horrible time! And that's what it was.

Trouble with the Fox: Ending the Application
I noticed (on Suzi-LNX: KDE 3.4 under SUSE 9.3) that Firefox was taking a honking amount of RAM... Right around 600 MB - yup, .6 GB of RAM... My Dual DDRii 533 sweet like cotton candy ram. My disk cache was down to 13% and SWAP was being used at right around 25%... Bad Mojo.

So, I decided that the thing to do would be to restart Firefox. Simply close it down and restart it. Simple, right? Well, moving right along...

So, while closing 'Fox, KDE reported that it wasn't able to get a response from one of the Firefox windows, and asked to terminate it or wait. Well, I was impatient, so I clicked terminate. That may have been a mistake, but it shouldn't have been. Firefox did close right then and there, but the next thing that happened was when I tired to start Firefox again...

Please Wait While We Load Your *cough*broken*cough* Browser
I was prompted with a screen to choose a profile or create a new one. I've seen this before in Windows 2000 - it would happen when Firefox was closed and started to leave memory, but didn't completely exit... Leaving a small portion of Firefox in memory. When I would restart 'fox, it would ask which profile to use. If I chose the only one there, "Default" it would say that the profile is already in use. I would have to exit the Firefox profile screen use task manager to close the other firefox that was in memory (it would be the one in there that was only taking up less than 5 megabytes of RAM). Then I could restart Firefox without any trouble.

In Linux, however, when I got the profiles screen, I would exit the screen and use KSysGuard, but when I did that, I wouldn't see Firefox mentioned anywhere. I tried logging off and back on, with no change... I even restarted the machine, but the problem persisted.

I was so annoyed by all of this, that I decided to uninstall and reinstall Firefox (I didn't want to deal with having multiple profiles for Firefox). That did fix that problem, but it cost me all of my bookmarks (which I had most of them backed up).

Wrapping it up... After half an hour
I'm not sure why this problem occurred in Linux... I figure that there was some small potion of Firefox that would start up with KDE that I just wasn't realizing. That may have been fixed by doing some creative solution that would load KDE without loading all the "remembered applications" but I didn't end up researching it.

I am a little concerned about problems like this... I've seen it a few times in Windows, but that was with a version of Firefox (in the 1.0.x range) that was shitty and another update was released just days later. Well, I guess alls well that ends well. However, it did take a good chunk out of my day.