malanciault.com

Since a few weeks, I’ve been seeing some weird borders in forms of some sites I’m using a lot, like Highrise and Freshbooks. At first, it only occurred in Highrise so I thought it might be a side effect of one of the updates 37signals are making every 2 weeks or so. I contacted them and they did not seem to have a clue what it was. Weird. If it was specific to Highrise, others would have reported it and 37signals would have fixed it. As it was not a biggie, I let it go.

But then, it started to do something similar in Freshbooks.

Again, not a big problem, but just enough to make me want to find a solution. Since it was not “site-related”, my second guess was that it might be addons related. So, one by one, I disabled every Firefox addon I’m using, restarting Firefox every time. When all the plugins were disabled, the problem was still there. Mmmmm…

So I went for the drastic solution: starting from scratch with an all new Firefox profile. I closed Firefox and went in /home/myusername/.mozilla/ and renamed firefox into firefox_backup. Restarted Firefox. A fresh new vanilla profile was created. And the problem was gone!

But then, I needed to re-install all addons, setup passwords again, importing bookmarks, etc… So, to avoid this in the future, once my Firefox was all configured properly again, I created a tarball of /home/myusername/.mozilla/firefox .

If anyone had a similar problem and find a better solution, please let me know!