Fixing “Chrome registration failed” error on Firefox 2.0.0.8+

Since the update to Firefox 2.0.0.8 I have been experiencing a problem of three “Chrome Registration Failed” error messages being presented to me every time I restarted Firefox.

With today’s update to Firefox 2.0.0.9 I had hoped that the problem would have been resolved.

Nope. Instead it only got worse, whenever I tried to update my add-ins and then edit their options, the add-ins pane froze. Looking on Mozilla.org I found one suggestion for a fix (delete the extensions.ini, extensions.cache and extensions.rdf files from your profile). On doing that however not only did it NOT fix my problem, but in fact it made it worse – every single add-in I had installed was reset to a “needs restart” and even after a restart the add-ins were not installing.

So on experimentation I tried the following:

(all this is on Windows Vista)

Right click on the Firefox icon on your desktop.

Select “run as administrator”

And poof – problems gone, all add-ins installed and working.

I then closed Firefox and restarted it (figured running as administrator is not a good general practice).

But count me as in the “pox on both your houses” camp here – to both Microsoft and to Mozilla.org. Microsoft for having such a clunky OS that occasionally you have to run processes as administrator (i.e. as “root”). And Mozilla.org for two serious bugs – first error messages that are BEYOND useless – reporting on an error WITHOUT NOTING WHAT CAUSED THE ERROR. And second, for building a USER application (a browser) which for some reason does something during the installation process of components (i.e. add-ins) which requires administrator rights.

Seriously bad coding somewhere.

And this is a case where Google failed me. Nothing I found after searching almost literally 100+ websites and online discussions had this fix, not even discussions on Mozilla.org (which reported inaccurate fixes for this problem in fact).

So hopefully this will help someone and the last two hours of my life which was wasted on fixing this will at least help someone else.

Update – some of the comments make it clear I was unclear in the above. After initially running Firefox as administrator I have not had to do so again, something about that one running fixed what I can only suspect were either permissions or registry issues. This fix has survived reboots and subsequent installations of additional Firefox plugins. Glad it has been helpful to a few of you (about 100 people or so a day have been reading this due mostly to Google searches)