Firefox freezes immediately when opened - can't do anything!
I have Firefox on my old Dell laptop which runs Ubuntu 10.04 (I can't upgrade to newer Ubuntu version because the hardware doesn't work with it - already tried.) For some unknown reason yesterday it started freezing when I tried to use the bookmark button and the Firefox dropdown menu (so I couldn't do a manual update.) I went to the Mozilla website and found instructions to do a reset, which I did. Now it is 100% worse because I have absolutely NO browser on my laptop! The Mozilla Ubuntu page loads and then absolutely nothing after that - completely frozen. I am writing this on my desktop. As far as I know there is no other browser on Ubuntu so I can't do anything at all online. Oh, before resetting I went to the Mozilla website and tried to download the current version and it downloaded and saved a bunch of files in a Firefox folder but I couldn't get it to run or anything. Is there something I can do with that Firefox folder to make it work? Or can I download Firefox on a USB drive and install it on my laptop from the drive? Somebody please help because I have no Internet on my laptop! Thank you.
All Replies (5)
Can you use a downloaded Linux browser? If Firefox will not work, how about SeaMonkey? http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/
You dan download the current version from Mozilla.org to a storage device, then put it in your laptop. Make sure you get the correct program. As to the problem you had before,
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} While you are in safe mode; Press the <Alt> or <F10> key to bring up the tool bar. Followed by;
Windows; Tools > Options Linux; Edit > Preferences Mac; application name > Preferences
Then Advanced > General. Look for and turn off Use Hardware Acceleration.
Poke around safe web sites and see if there is still a problem. Then restart.
Not sure how current a Firefox version you can run on the old Ubuntu 10.04 LTS from just over four years ago due to minimum certain package versions needed.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/30.0/system-requirements/
In your Firefox folder look for the Firefox binary and click on that to run it. If you can find it It should run even if not fully installed and lacking a launcher.
These are the instructions for installing Mozilla Firefox
I've got rid of my unsupported versions of Ubuntu but IIRC some old LTS versions did not update Firefox.
As for your old Dell not supporting a current version of Ubuntu: I would have thought the System requirements were pretty low. Possibly it is the Graphics and support for the fancy Unity desktop that is the problem,but you could try without that. This is not a Linux discussion forum but look at for instance
If you do try a more current Linux distro stay away from say Gnome 3 and KDE for starters.
There are various light desktop environments like Xfce, LXDE, IceWM for instance. Gnome 2 is much lighter compared to Gnome 3 and MATE is a fork of Gnome 2.
I currently use Xfce ever since Gnome went from 2 to 3. Which is nice as Xfec and IceWM were the first two I used and Xfce did not have a desktop then.