NeutralAxis

A lagging Firefox plug-in that hadn’t been updated for Firefox 3.5 yet has been keeping me from going ahead with the upgrade, but today the plugin was ready so I let the upgrade proceed.  It wasn’t painless though.  Ordinarily Firefox updates are dead simple, but this one took a little effort to get working again.

I’ll preface this with the fact that this upgrade was on a Windows XP Pro computer I use for work.  I haven’t done the upgrade yet on a Linux system.

After letting the automatic upgrade happen, Firefox wanted to be restarted of course.  I let it do that, but after closing it didn’t restart.  When I clicked the Firefox icon it gave me an error message that a file was missing.  I tried a few more times, but it kept report the same problem.  Finally, I opened IE and redownloaded Firefox and just did a re-install.  It started fine after that.

However, I noticed that my Google Toolbar wasn’t working.  Not only was it missing some of my custom search buttons and the gmail icon, but the Options button wasn’t working.  I tried disabling and re-enabling with no luck.  Even the toolbar’s uninstall option wasn’t working.  I was able to uninstall it from the Firefox add-ons pull down though.  After re-downloading and installing the toolbar fresh, it worked OK with all my custom buttons and bookmarks intact.  I suspect the problem might have been that my toolbar wasn’t up-to-date before I did the Firefox upgrade.  I realize, after doing the reinstall, that my previous toolbar wasn’t showing the new Google icon on the search button.  For some reason, even though Google says updates are automatic, I sometimes notice that I’m not current.

[Update: A second Windows XP Pro system upgraded to Firefox 3.5 with no difficulty.  But before this upgrade I manually updated the Google Toolbar to the current version.]