Firefox and Norton: FIGHT!

Davey Winder
Saturday, 06 September 2008 14:35

Business IT - Technology

The director of user experience for Firefox at Mozilla, Mike Beltzner, has tried to keep the peace and admits that there are problems with Firefox 3.0.1 and Norton Identity Safe.

Although some of the advice does sound, at least at first, a little bizarre. Take this response in a Google Groups support forum to a user complaining that he or she has lost their Identity Safe logins and passwords, as well as their bookmarks, when upgrading from Firefox 3.0

"Please make sure that you don't have any antivirus or firewall software running" says Mike. Which is odd when you consider it is a feature of a security product that is being talked about.

Fans of Brit sitcom The IT Crowd will love the next bit as he also suggested "try giving your computer a reboot."

Mike and Mozilla are only too aware of the problems, and the problems in finding a solution as it would seem recreating it the QA labs has been impossible so far.

It appears likely that the fault lies with older Norton installations that have not been updated properly, preventing Firefox from terminating entirely when closed, and so causing problems finding certain files after an upgrade.

Hence the 'have you tried turning it off and on again' approach which apparently has worked in some case. Not so daft after all then. But Symantec, it seems, might have had the final say on this one.

Tony Weiss, the Norton Forums Administrator at Symantec, has told users that a Norton Internet Security patch is available. NIS 2008 users have to first update to v15.5 in order to use this though.

A similar patch is available for Norton 360 users, both accessible via the Symantec Live Update system.

So maybe the problem is now solved after all, and Mozilla and Symantec can happily live together again.

However, as 'roosterfish' points out in the Norton support forum "Some notification on the issue from both Norton to its paying subscribers, and Firefox at the prompt to update to version 3, might have been nice.............."