Question | Firefox Help

posted by fredex 5 months ago

"Couldn't load XRE functions" when starting FF 18.0, Linux.

just installed FF 18.0 on Linux (Centos 5.8) where 17.0.1 has been running fine.

I always install in a local (to my login) directory, and have a desktop launcher to start it. I download each .tar.bz2 FF package to a subdir, where I unpack it, overwriting whatever was already in the firefox directory in that location.

doing that, I get the error above. so I renamed the directory and did a fresh extraction into the firefox directory that tar creates when unpacking the archive. SAME PROBLEM.

moving that directory aside and re-extracting the 17.0.1 archive yields a working Firefox.

What can I do to solve this problem?

the troubleshooting info below came from FF 17.0.1, since FF18.0 doesn't work.

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cor-el 5 months ago

It is always best to create a new directory and extract the content from the tar.bz2 archive to that directory instead of doing this in a directory that already has a Firefox installation or you can delete all the files in it.

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fredex 5 months ago

as you can see in my posting, I also did that. No change.

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cor-el 5 months ago
Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.
See "Creating a profile":
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox#Profile_issues
If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox
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johnofgaunt 5 months ago

It seems firefox 18 requires glibc 2.11 which centos 5 does not have. So I upgraded to 17.0.2 esr.

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cor-el 5 months ago
Weird:
The system requirements for Firefox 17.0.1 show: GLib 2.22 or higher
- http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/17.0.1/system-requirements/
The system requirements for Firefox 17.0.2 (esr) and Firefox 16.0.2 show: GLib 2.12 or higher
- http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/17.0.2/system-requirements/
- http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/16.0.2/system-requirements/
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fredex 5 months ago

these pages say "glib". which is NOT the same as glibc, which an earlier poster in this series said required a later version than I have. Was that earlier poster mistaken, perhaps, should have said "glib" ??
and when it says "glib", does that mean the package(s) that red hat/centos name "glib2-2.*.rpm" ??

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