Firefox 3.5 Embarrassments

(This entry is 'dated' and will become irrelevant some day - at the moment " Vista + FireFox 3.5 + Karpersky " is an incompatible combination)

Well, I had to stop using Firefox after it upgraded itself to 3.5 – but switching to Opera has started to grow on me. (http://www.opera.com/).  Opera seems very light and agile after using either FireFox or IE, and while it doesn't work well on heavy ASP business sites, but I can use IE for those anyway.

Although the issue has (perhaps) been solved for others, it hasn't helped me yet so I put this web page up to help others discover the secrets which a month of casual web searches didn't find for me.

Half the time when I start FireFox, it hangs using 100% of one of my four cores. Then I must open the Windows Task Manager and manually kill FireFox off.  Whenever FireFox does succeed in running again, I get that "this is embarrassing" error display which so many FireFox apologists are in love with.

Worse, I have FireFox set to open a BLANK page when it starts, so this "embarrassing" message about failing to reopen pages I don't want to see is beyond annoying. Again, the FireFox apologists say isn't it wonderful that a potentially harmful web page which crashed FireFox is the very first thing FireFox tries to open after restarting. If this crazy behavior was a user-option which I could enable or disable then I won't mind, but I am forced to accept this asinine default which over-rides my explicit request to always start FireFox with a blank page!

The issue is (I guess) solved for others, but not me.  http://support.mozilla.com mentions there is an issue with FireFox and Karpersky.

My company forces me to use Vista Business, plus Karpersky Internet Security 2009 – and some feature within ( Vista + FireFox 3.5 + Karpersky) clashes. Suggestions to “update Karpersky” don't help me because corporate “Security Policy” locks me out of doing anything with it. “They” (meaning IT) push down updates daily, but I have no idea when they'll risk the firmware update which works with FireFox given the strain Vista + Karpersky + MS Office 2007 + VPN causes on most of the notebooks around here.