“Firefox (& BBEdit) Problems Due to Corrupt Fonts”

I forgot to mention that I did eventually figure out what was wrong with Firefox.

The symptom was singular: Firefox would lock up shortly after I launched it. I have two different versions on my system, and use different profiles for each of them, but I keep their bookmarks in sync. Since both versions were crashing, I thought the problem must be the bookmarks file. (Yet, I hadn't changed the bookmarks at all.)

In fact, I opened the bookmarks.html file from my Firefox profile in BBEdit, to see if I could spot a problem. I scrolled down through the file... and BBEdit locked up, too!!! Repeatedly.

Finally, I edited the bookmarks file in Vim, deleting the "offending" line which contained — oh the horror — a UTF-8 character which was "above ASCII". Yet, that bookmark had been there for months, without changing. Why the problem now?

When I restarted Firefox with the fixed bookmarks.html file, it didn't lock up... until I tried to load my own home page!

The same thing happened with a brand new profile. And both SeaMonkey and the old Mozilla suite had the same problem. Clearly, the bookmarks.html file wasn't the real problem, it was just a trigger.

But wait... how did BBEdit fit into this mess?

While I was telling Greg about the problem, it hit me. This must be a corrupt font.

That was it. A few of the fonts in my ~/Library/Fonts folder were corrupt. (Apparently, some of that corruption was recent, which is still a concern.) I .zipped up the whole Fonts folder and removed the original, then logged out and back in again.

Problem solved!