Introduction

I’m a keen fan of Mozilla Firefox web browser and was very excited when a new version came out. Having installed that on my Vista work PC and found a real speed boost, I rushed to upgrade it at home… only to find it hangs at startup on Windows 7.

Procedure

This is the most interesting part. By default, your 3.0.11 browser will not upgrade to 3.5. Looks like they know something. Well, I didn’t, so I just went to Check for Updates... under Help menu and downloaded the latest version. After passing through several welcome screens telling good news about 3.5, I restarted Firefox and enjoyed the promised land. Yes, before restart, Windows 7 seemed to recognize and even like the new browser.

Next morning I needed my PC to look for weather forecast. Just as about every day, I launched Firefox and … for some reason it hung for 30 seconds or more, after which I could resume working. Later I investigated that this behavior would happen every time I restarted Firefox (usual close/open sequence). By that time I was quite upset with Windows 7’s bad support for my favorite browser and I was forced to go back to 3.0.11.

Conclusion

Be careful with new installations under Windows 7. Even more careful than under Vista, whose ability to fail is rather constant. At least, according to my experience.

UPDATE: This bug was fixed in version 3.5.1. Thanks, Mozilla!