A few people have reported issues with Firefox 9.0.1 not working with some database features with the main problem being that you can’t download the summitslist.csv file. This is about 6Mb in size and the symptom is only a few kb are downloaded.
I’ve checked and here are my results
Windows XP Pro (32), Firefox 9.0.1, works
Windows 7 Pro (32), Firefox 9.0.1, works
Windows 7 Pro (64), Firefox 9.0.1, works
Linux (Debian 6 32), Firefox 9.0.1, works
Linux (RedHat 5 64), Firefox 9.0.1, works
I can’t test OS X as I don’t have any Apple kit. One of the reported problems was with OS X 10.7 so I’m not sure if this is a common problem on OS X or if there are people having issues with Firefox 9.0.1 using Windows or Linux.
In all the above cases I visited getfirefox.com and clicked the download icon for the right version of 9.0.1 for the OS the machine ran. Machines were using Core 2 Duo (XP, RedHat 5), Core i7 (W7 64), Xeon X5460 (W7 32) or Pentium 4 M (Debian 6).
I just downloaded Firefox 9.0.1 and installed it on Max OS/X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard).
I then downloaded summitslist.csv and I think I’ve got a valid copy.
This has all the hallmarks of a corrupt profile issue I had/have on Windows Vista in work. Every other user on the same machine could download files but I only got a few strings of garbage and it took ages to download. Our IT guys were scratching their heads and in the end created me a new profile and imported my “My Documents”. This caused me weeks of pain setting up all the programs I use.
Yesterday I had another issue where everyone can print except me. They worked on that for hours and then used the same trick of creating a new profile. Unfortunately the new fix lasted just long enough for the administrators to go home. I now have to get through my night shifts by emailing everything to my colleague so he can print it out.
At home Helen and I have two identical machines with the same software installed. She has all sorts of problems with Firefox crashing on start up and can’t get Flash to work with it. We have removed and reinstalled Firefox and Flash loads of times. It usually takes several goes every time there is an update before it will run. I have never had anything do that under Windows 7, it is the most stable operating system yet and I prefer Firefox to any other browser I have tried. The only difference between the two is I have always run advertisement blocking software after finding malicious code hidden in some and I don’t play silly games on Facebook for the same reason.
Maybe those with problems might try creating a new profile on their machine and see if the problem still occurs.