UPDATE: As of release 3.6.2 of Firefox for Mac, my issues seem to have been resolved. Installed it the morning of 03/23 and everything seems fine now. I know others continue to have issues, so something weird is going on…

The day Firefox 3.6 was released, I immediately upgraded all my computers to this latest version, since Firefox is my browser of choice. On my Windows boxes, the upgrade was seamless, as it was on my Linux box. The issues began when I started to upgrade my Mac computers. Once the upgrade was complete, attempting to start Firefox 3.6 on any of my Macs was a futile effort. The Firefox icon would bounce a couple times on the Dock and then just stop. Firefox would simply not start. Launching it in Safe Mode, I was able to actually use Firefox but that was simply an unacceptable solution for any type of regular usage. I uninstalled, reinstalled, cleaned out every trace of Firefox and then installed again. Nothing worked and I always ended up with the same issue. I began looking through the Firefox Bugzilla site on Mozilla in order to see if I was alone. Turns out I’m not the only one suffering from this problem. Mozilla has yet to acknowledge the issue, even though it seems to be more and more wide spread. Even worse, the issue still exists in the latest development release which will eventually be Firefox 3.6.1. So for now, I’m back to running Firefox 3.5.8 on my Macs, as much as it pains me. Mozilla doesn’t seem to be interested in spending time looking into this issue, so I’ll have to use the 3.5.x release until they finally admit there’s an issue. This whole mess has even gotten me to spend more and more time with Google’s Chrome browser. I’ve VERY impressed with Chrome and if they keep throwing in more features at the same rate they are now, and if my issues with the 3.6.x release of Firefox continue, who knows what browser I’ll be using by the end of the year.

Mozilla, get your act together and listen to your users; they’re telling you there’s a big issue with your current code and you’re just brushing us aside. Not a smart move when you consider that the browser wars are no longer being fought by only two entities…