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Firefox giving XML parse errors all of a sudden; fails to start

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  • 41 have this problem
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  • Last reply by speleo01

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Starting Firefox on Centos 5.5 (i386) fails, with error popup: XML Parsing error: error in processing external entity reference Location: chome://browser/content/browser.xul Line number 15, column 1

Starting Firefox on Centos 5.5 (i386) fails, with error popup: XML Parsing error: error in processing external entity reference Location: chome://browser/content/browser.xul Line number 15, column 1

All Replies (4)

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This may be a problem with an add-on.

Try Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode

If the problem disappears it's an add-on - try disabling them to see which it is.

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Safe mode does not fix the issue, nor does uninstalling firefox, removing all traces from the system and reinstalling.

Version installed from CentOS repositories:3.6.4-8.el5.centos

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I don't know what this is. I would suggest a lot of googling and asking on Centos forums.

Have you tried setting up a new profile - see Troubleshoot and diagnose Firefox problems

Does it happen whenever you start up? Was this an upgrade from a previous version? If so I wonder if there's a dependency problem in the Centos rpm - perhaps a mismatch with xulrunner. You could try reinstalling xulrunner (or updating it if there's a later version). I had a similar problem with SUSE rpms recently.

Or you could try installing the Mozilla tgz for comparison. If you do that set up a new profile and keep the two versions separate (or uninstall the Centos one)

That's all I can think of for now.

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I recently had this problem and noticed that the "Work Offline" option had somehow been checked (in the drop-down menu when Firefox is clicked in the uppermost left corner of the page)...I unchecked that and the errors disappeared.