I also had this problem and after going through all my plugins and not finding anything that fixed the problem other than using safe mode, I changed my start page from Google to Blank... that worked!! I suppose there is something on Google's new little animation for the Olympics which is not compatible with Firefox.

I too have had Firefox for years and NEVER had an issue (was using V14) until a few days ago. I had my homepage set to google and only in the past 2 or 3 days have I had an issue - I would open firefox and almost IMMEDIATELY it would close saying firefox crashed. Does this have something to do with their olympic animations as the above user said?? I even upgraded to the 15.0 Beta version and am STILL having the same issue! :( I ended up having to go into control panel to my Flash Player settings, click on check now for updates to at least open firefox on the Adobe Flash homepage to get it up at least then I was at least able to switch my homepage to NPR instead of Google and now I am on (obviously!). I submitted crash reports but never heard back from Mozilla. Is this being researched? What is the root cause and will there be a fix? I am also on the latest version of Flash (11.3.300.270) so that should not be an issue. Please advise ASAP. Thank you

The Google animated "doodle" isn't a Flash presentation.

This issue is being discussed in a number of different Bug reports, and it looks like there are a half-a-dozen (at least) Mozilla developers discussing it.

Thanks - I wasn't sure if it did use flash or not, but I still tried to move to that latest version anyway to rule it out. Obviously it wasn't helpful. Thanks. Keep us posted!

For anyone experiencing crashes on the Google Homepage, for now it is best to set your home page to something else (like about:home, which also provides a Google Search Box), until these doodle's are gone, or a Firefox fix is released (whichever comes first). We will fix this issue so it doesn't happen again in the future, but the current set of doodles may be gone before then.

How to set the home page

Another way to fix this crash until an update is released is to temporarily disable hardware Acceleration, which you can do with the instructions at Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL

Thanks, changed the start page and now it works!