Troubleshooting Information page

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This article describes the "Troubleshooting Information" page generated by typing "about:support" into the Location Bar or by going to the Help menu and selecting "Troubleshooting Information".

Applies to:

  • Firefox 3.7a1pre and above since 2009-09-25 (bug 367596)
  • SeaMonkey 2.1a2pre and above since 2010-05-22 (bug 545110)
  • Thunderbird 5.0 and above since 2011-06-28 [1]

Troubleshooting Information

Quick access to profile directory is a notable feature of the Troubleshooting Information page. Starting in Firefox 3.6, you can use about:support (directly) or go through "Help -> Troubleshooting Information" and then, from the "Application Basics" section, you can click on a button to open the profile folder for the profile currently in use. Starting in Firefox 13, the "Reset Firefox to its default state" option lets you easily create a new Firefox profile and migrate essential information.

Each section of the Troubleshooting Information page is described below.

Give Firefox a tune up

Note: The "Reset Firefox to its default state" section was renamed "Give Firefox a tune up" and the "Reset Firefox" button was renamed "Refresh Firefox" in Firefox 35. [2] [3]

The top of the Troubleshooting Information page has a Refresh Firefox button that will automatically transfer important data such as bookmarks, browsing history, cookies, passwords, and form-fill data to a new Firefox profile. This feature also deletes the old profile from the Profile Manager and saves the contents of the old Firefox profile folder to the Desktop, in a folder named "Old Firefox Data".

Firefox 48 and below: When multiple profiles exist, the Refresh option is only available in the "default" profile (e.g., the last profile started in the Profile Manager, which would be the profile that includes the line "Default=1" in the profiles.ini file). this option does not appear if you bypass the Profile Manager to start a non-default profile. This is fixed in Firefox 49 (bug 1265368). [4] [5] [6] [7].

Application Basics

  • Name and Version basic identification of your Mozilla product
  • User Agent is the user agent string reference providing more specific reference to developers and sites, the same information as you would see if you entered the following into the Error Console:   javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent) Note: Starting in Firefox 16, only the major version number is shown (e.g., 16.0 instead of 16.0.1). [8]
  • Profile Folder or Profile Directory (depending on OS and application version) contains a button labeled "Show Folder" (Windows) "Open Directory" (Linux) "Open Containing Folder" (Windows and Linux) or "Show in Finder" (Mac OS) that provides quick access to your profile folder.
  • Enabled Plugins provides a link to a separate about:plugins list; refer to the top of your own about:plugins list for references.
  • Build Configuration provides a link to a separate about:buildconfig list
  • Crash Reports links to the about:crashes list of submitted crash reports
  • Memory Use links to about:memory to show memory usage [9]

Extensions

Provides a list of installed extensions, including the extension name, version, enabled status and ID.

Note: Looking at the Extension table you will notice that the list is not sorted. (In recent builds, all enabled extensions come first, sorted by name, then all disabled ones, also sorted by name.). Sorting on any table column can be done using an extension such as "TableTools2" or with a bookmarklet such as "sort table" (suggested keyword shortcut "sorttable:").  The bookmarklet can only sort on major, not on minor then major as with the extension. The bookmarklet adds a/d to top of table columns.

ID

The ID column specifically identifies an extension and is usually a GUID number. You will find references to the number in the filenames for extensions in your profile, in configuration variables in about:config, in crash reports, and in Compatibility Reporting listings.

Only GUIDs and IDs of extension@domain form are now accepted. For example, the DOM Inspector has inspector@mozilla.org for its ID. (install.rdf) (Updating extensions)

Note: You can select the ID number and run a bookmarklet to show you the Compatibility Reporter listing for the id, for instance the "Stylish" extension has a GUID of "{46551EC9-40F0-4e47-8E18-8E5CF550CFB8}" and the "Show Parent Folder" extension has an ID of "showParentFolder@alice" with that information you can find the Compatibility Reports for Stylish :: Add-ons for Firefox or the Compatibility Reports for Show Parent Folder :: Add-ons for Firefox and you can see how these reports helped both extension developers and beta testers to find and isolate problems during beta testing of Firefox. The following bookmarklet, with a suggested keyword shortcut of "reporter:" will allow you to preselect a single GUID in the listing before invoking the bookmarklet, or to paste it into the dialog box after invoking the bookmarklet.

Bookmarklet for Reporter: Compatibility Reports for GUID supplied (Add-on Compatibility Reporter)

javascript:q%20=%20''%20+%20(window.getSelection%20?%20window.getSelection()
%20:%20document.getSelection%20?%20document.getSelection()%20:%20
document.selection.createRange().text);
%20if%20(!q)%20q%20=%20prompt('Enter%20your%20search%20here',%20'');%20if%20(q!=null)
%20location='https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/reporter/'%20+%20q.replace(/%20/g,%20'');%20void%200

The bookmarklet can also be found within k.html bookmarks and bookmarklets.

Modified Preferences

Provides an abbreviated list of important user changed preferences pertaining directly to your Mozilla product, not to user installed extensions. Read about about:config general information and the many of the specific about:config entries.

Graphics

(Added in Firefox 4.) Provides information to help debug problems related to graphics devices and drivers and to determine whether WebGL and hardware acceleration is enabled or blocked based on your graphics driver. Note that graphics information displayed for Mac and Linux may be incomplete. [10] [11] If hardware acceleration is enabled, the GPU Accelerated Windows entry will show something similar to "1/1 Direct3D 10" (Windows) or "1/1 OpenGL" (Mac OS X 10.6). [12] Read this for more on Direct3D and OpenGL. However, if hardware acceleration is automatically disabled, the about:support Graphics section will simply display "GPU Accelerated Windows: 0/1” or similar, meaning 0 accelerated windows over the total number of windows. [13] [14] [15] [16]. On Windows, issues with graphics drivers are often resolved by updating those drivers. On Mac, you'll need to be running Mac OS X 10.6.3 or above so you should update your Mac OS, if possible. As of this writing, hardware acceleration is usually not enabled by default on Linux platforms (with rare exceptions for some graphics drivers known to be stable). For instance, you may see (in SeaMonkey 2.2a1pre running on openSUSE Linux with "intel" X11 driver) "GPU Accelerated Windows: 0/4. For more information, see this article and this blog post. For help updating your graphics driver, see this article.

See also

External links