Recently I booted up my computer and started Firefox... only to have Gmail fail to load. It worked only when I switched from "Standard mode" to "Basic HTML" mode. I also noticed that certain images on other websites failed to load properly, including the "Google" image on its main page in classic view. Google maps wouldn't work either. The last thing I noticed before fixing the problem was that, on http://www.chess.com, the board loaded properly, but not the pieces. Uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox didn't help, nor did a system restore on my computer.

The solution? Disable a firefox add-on called "Google Update 1.2.183.39"

Anyone else have similar issues? As you can tell I'm not at all tech-savvy, so I have no idea why the hell this solution worked. I figured that I'd post about it b/c find it unnerving that disabling what appears to be a legit Google update seems to have "fixed" the problems.

2/13/2011 9:34:09 AM

You should indeed disable the Google Updater plugin; I have no idea why Google registers this with every single browser when it only works with Google products (like Picasa and Chrome).

Similarly, if you have Flock, you'll notice a "Flock Updater" plugin registered with all of your other NPAPI (non-IE) browsers, and you should disable this in all browsers other than Flock.

IMO you should post about this problem on Bugzilla and hope that Mozilla proactively disables Google Updater in Firefox 3.6+

2/13/2011 3:08:24 PM