Firefox Issues Starting 7/3/11

in that Firefox 5.0 was working under Snow Leopard but not working under Lion.

But then again, I don't use OS X very often. Initial thoughts:

1.) See if it happens on other CNET sites, such as CNET News or CNET Downloads. It could be other JS on the page causing an issue, such as from a targeted ad.
2.) Since you have development experience, check Firebug to see if any JS errors are occurring. (Shouldn't be necessary, but since you have the knowledge...)
3.) Try creating a new profile in Firefox, not just Safe Mode. Some settings persist even in Firefox's Safe Mode.

John

Looks like it was me. Still don't know what exactly happened, but it appears to have been some kind of profile corruption within Firefox. The odd part is, I could copy over a working profile from a clone of my drive I made just before upgrading, and that wouldn't work. I could even grab a time machine backup from like a week ago, and that wouldn't work. I let Firefox create a new profile and it works.

And just a FYI, P, for when Lion is released to the masses... Looks like Apple took to hiding the Library folders. They still exist if you know the path or go poking around with the command line, but Finder will hide them. So you'll want to be ready to adjust any of your bag of tricks to take this into account.

In any case, as I was clearly wrong, I'll take this opportunity to apologize to the Cnet devs for my hasty accusation. As odd as it seemed that only one site, and then only a subset of links within that site, wouldn't work, I made the accusation before trying a clean profile which ultimately resolved the issue.

This too may be a useful dry run for when Lion is released to the masses. Odds are I won't be the only one, because as I was watching the install log, I noticed a bunch of post processing on Library folders. Whether or not that had anything to do with my issue, and why it wouldn't be cured by copying over a backup profile are all good questions we'll probably never know the answer to.