Red Hat Knowledgebase

Release Found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Symptom:
When I try to start Mozilla, the machine thinks about it but then nothing happens.

Solution:
There are two common causes of this problem: there is a dead or defunct Mozilla process still running or the .mozilla directory has become corrupt.

To check for the first issue, see if there is a Mozilla process still running by typing the following command:

# ps -aux | grep mozilla
USER   PID   %CPU %MEM VSZ     RSS    TTY  STAT START   TIME   COMMAND
tom    28544 2.3  14.7 160104  37336  ?    S    10:15   10:53 /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4.2/mozilla-bin -UILocale en-US

If a process is still running like the example above, kill it by typing:

# kill <PID>

where the <PID> is the process ID, 28544, for the above example.

If this does not seem to fix the problem, the .mozilla directory may have become corrupt. This happens more frequently after an extension is installed or an upgrade is made to Mozilla.

The easiest way to fix this is to delete the .mozilla directory in the users home directory, ie: /home/$username/.mozilla, where $username is the username.

rm -rf /home/$username/.mozilla

Be very careful when doing this because deleting the wrong directory can cause unexpected results. All saved settings and bookmarks will be lost.

Back-up or copy the .mozilla directory before removing it so that settings and bookmarks can be copied back. Execute the following command to make a copy of the .mozilla directory:

cp /home/$username/.mozilla /home/$username/.mozilla-old