10. Troubleshooting

The base Mozilla code is designed to support W3C standards as thoroughly as possible. Some sites either use erroneous browser sniffing, or write their pages for the quirks of older non-standard browsers, rather than using standards-compliant HTML that all current browsers (e.g. Mozilla-based browsers, Konqueror, Opera, Internet Explorer 6+) can read. If this is the case, you should direct your webmaster to the Mozilla Web Author FAQ and Netscape DevEdge.

If your page uses CSS but the server sends the style sheet as ‘text/plain’ rather than ‘text/css’, the style sheet will not be used. In this case, you should contact the web server administrator about the misconfiguration.

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The most likely cause is that you did not install the Personal Security Manager when you installed Mozilla. Uninstall Mozilla and reinstall with it included. You can also install it directly for Windows and Linux.

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Some transparent proxies (including some versions of Junkbuster) do not handle HTTP/1.1 properly. The first thing to try is to go to Edit | Preferences | Advanced | HTTP Networking and select ‘Use HTTP 1.0’.

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You can usually work around this by right-clicking the link, going to ‘Save Link Target As’, saving the file to disk and then viewing the saved file locally.

The most likely cause is that the web server is sending the MIME content-type of the file as ‘text/plain’. Mozilla looks at the identified content-type rather than the file extension. You can see what content-type the server has sent the file as by going to View | Page Info. If it is incorrect, you should contact the web server administrator about the misconfiguration.

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Some third-party themes lack a file called fakeAccount.css. The absence of this file can cause buggy behavior, such as windows failing to minimize properly. Check if a more recent version of the theme is available.

If you feel comfortable with experimenting with theme files, create an empty file called fakeAccount.css and put it into the JAR of the affected theme. JARs are standard zip files, so you can open and rewrite them using the zip utility of your choice. Be sure to keep a copy of the original JAR file on hand in case of problems.

If this does not fix the problem, and the problem does not occur after uninstalling the theme and using Classic or Modern, you may wish to report the problem to the theme’s author.

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Put this in user.js, replacing 1,3,7 with the list of port numbers you need to connect to:

user_pref("network.security.ports.banned.override", "1,3,7");

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You need to switch on both JavaScript (in Edit | Preferences | Advanced | Scripts & Windows) and Software Installation (in Edit | Preferences | Advanced | Software Installation) for this to work.

If it still doesn’t work, try downloading the XPI and installing it directly.

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Check that Software Installation is enabled, then open the file in Mozilla by dragging it to the browser window; by opening it using File | Open File; by typing the location into the location bar; or (in Windows) by double-clicking on the XPI file and telling Windows to open .xpi files using Mozilla.

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There is not yet a method of automatically uninstalling XPIs other than themes. However, when you have uninstalled Mozilla prior to installing a new build, you can manually remove the unwanted XPI.

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You should never install a new version of Mozilla over a previous one.

There are two possible workarounds:

1. Properly uninstall Mozilla and then try to reinstall.

2. If you still have the problem, exit Mozilla (including Quick Launch), go to your profile folder and delete localstore.rdf. (Some of your preferences may revert to their defaults.)

If these don’t fix the problem, you may have a corrupt profile, and will need to restore its contents to a fresh one.

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Try closing and opening the sidebar again, with the F9 key. If this fails, it may be a corrupt profile – create a fresh profile and see if the sidebar works with that.

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The two common causes of e-mail problems in Mozilla Mail are:

1. Some test builds of Mozilla have been known to improperly compact mail folders, rendering the mail within unreadable by Mozilla Mail/News.

2. The mail summary files (files with the .msf extension) have become corrupted.

In the first case: the mail files are stored as plain text, so you can try opening the mail files with a text editor (or word processor) to recover the text of your e-mail by hand.

In the second case: exit Mozilla (including Quick Launch), find the folders in your user profile that contain your e-mail (the Mail and, if you use IMAP, ImapMail folders). Back up your mail folders, and delete the .msf files. Do not delete files that appear without any extension – these are the files that contain your actual e-mail. Restarting Mozilla Mail should automatically generate new summary files.

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This is a symptom of profile corruption from sharing a profile between Mozilla and Netscape. (One of this FAQ’s writers once had a 497 megabyte bookmark file precisely because of this.) The only solution, unfortunately, appears to be to delete the corrupted file. However, if you’ve just switched to Mozilla, you should still be able to copy over your Netscape bookmarks after the fact.

If you wish to use both Netscape and Mozilla, you should always ensure that they are using separate profiles in order to prevent possible profile corruption.

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If Nautilus has been configured to use the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, installing a mozilla.org binary on top of that may cause odd problems and conflicts. You should use the package of Mozilla supplied by your Unix or GNU/Linux distribution, as their version should work properly with their package of GNOME.

If you want to install a testing build of Mozilla, install it to a non-default location (e.g., in your home directory), and leave the system defaults to use the older distribution version.

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This happens when the anti-virus program is set to check all files (not just those that can actually carry malicious code), and to lock or quarantine any file containing anything it thinks is a virus signature.

Switch off your anti-virus, open your inbox (deleting any e-mail with attachments that may contain a virus), set the anti-virus to scan only file types that can actually carry malicious code, take the anti-virus out of ‘paranoid’ mode if it is set to that, and switch it back on.

Mozilla Mail is not susceptible to known e-mail viruses.

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When Mozilla access a secure site or mail server, it needs to access Personal Security Manager (PSM), but ZoneAlarm mistakens the internal communication as an attempt to set up a local server. If you are prompt about this, you may safely grant Mozilla access. If you have mistakenly denied Mozilla access and now Mozilla is not working properly, follow the following steps:

1. Open ZoneAlarm’s Programs tab and find MOZILLA.EXE.
2. Under Allow connect, make sure both Local and Internet have check marks next to them (left-most position)
3. Under Allow server, make sure that Local has a check mark next to it and that Internet has an X next to it (middle position).

These sites have opted out of the Password Manager