Newsmonster filled with bugs
I downloaded an extension to FireFox. It looked pretty professional. I actually found it through StumbleUpon. The program is called NewsMonster. Besides the bugs that I keep running into, it seems that it doesn’t allow my other extensions in my toolbars to interact with the main browser window.
Has anyone else heard about this program? I’m getting really fed up with this. This is just the free version and doesn’t work. I can’t see myself going pro if the free version is causing me so much pain. Anyway, here is an email that I fired off to the support (burton@newsmonster.org) explaining the bugs that I keep running into.
I can not remove this program. This program does not show up as an extension. I can not get this program to do much of anything without giving me some errors. I tried reinstalling it, but I didn’t get the initial settings screen the next time that I started Firefox. I’ve closed all applications and opened the browser a few times hoping that I just needed to reset something. I have about 6 bugs to report:
1. Under “Help > News Monster > Submit Problem Report”, I get the following message:
XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity
Location: chrome://newsmonster/content/newsmonster-report.xul
Line Number 1, Column 1:</window>
^2. Under “Help > News Monster > Check for Update” - nothing happends. No message of success or failure.
3. Under “Help > News Monster > Register”, I get the following message:
XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity
Location: chrome://newsmonster/content/newsmonster-register.xul
Line Number 1, Column 1:<m
^4. Under “Help > News Monster > About News Monster”, I get the following message:
XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity
Location: chrome://newsmonster/content/newsmonster-version.xul
Line Number 1, Column 1:^
5. Under “Tools > News Monster > Synchronize Profile …”, I get the following message:
XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity
Location: chrome://newsmonster/content/newsmonster-synchronize-profile.xul
Line Number 1, Column 1:</window>
^6. Under “Edit > Newsmonster Preferences …” I get a very tiny titlebar. There is not text for the title and I see an X. The form itself is not displayed. I can not resize this form to see anything.
I am running Windows XP Professional
Firefox 1.0.1
Extensions: DOM Inspecter 1.0, StumbleUpon 1.9993, Html Validator (based on Tidy) 0.5.3, EditCSS 0.2.3, Checky 2.5, googlebar 0.9.0.30, Google Pagerank Status 0.9.4If nothing can be done to help, I would at least like to know how to uninstall this program. I tried following the instructions on your website, but when I clicked on Newsmonster Preferences, my form didn’t display as expected. Also, your newsmonster doesn’t appear as an extension that I can uninstall or set preferences on like my other extensions.
Hopefully someone will get back to me. In the meantime, I just upgraded Firefox to 1.0.2 and I’m still having the same problems.
April 1st, 2005 at 4:54 pm
Maybe they want to pull the old “oh well those bugs are all fixed in the pro-version” routine. I hate that bit.
April 1st, 2005 at 8:26 pm
Lewis, do you use MT? I’m trying to set it up, and need some advice.
April 1st, 2005 at 9:38 pm
No, I use the cheap blogger.com service. My PHP site doesn’t have a MySQL database, so I can’t setup MT on it.
April 3rd, 2005 at 9:42 pm
I use Onfolio. There is a free Release Candidate available. I love it.
June 1st, 2005 at 2:12 am
I had a very similar run-in with NewsMonster a while back. I run Linux, but I think that my solution will still work for you: I found that deleting Firefox’s preferences folder does the trick. This might cause you to lose bookmarks, saved passwords, etc. (I don’t remember what happened to me, it was a while ago), but it kills NewsMonster.
I would guess that on Windows XP, the Firefox folder is somewhere under “C:Documents and Settings\Application DataMozilla”. Look for anything to do with “profiles”.
Good luck to you!
October 13th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
I had trouble with this too!
ccb056 at computerbb was nice enough to post general instructions to remove firefox extensions. I found it necessary to do this to uninstall newsmonster - instructions here:
http://www.computerbb.org/post-5448.html
A copy of the instructions:
1: Exit Mozilla Firefox
2: Browse to the “chrome” directory of your Mozilla Firefox application directory.
3: Delete “chrome.rdf” and the “overlayinfo” directory (they will regenerated on next Firefox startup).
4: Delete [extensionname].jar (or the [extensionname] directory, if it has one).
5: Remove every line with a reference to [extensionname] from “installed-chrome.txt”. Usually there are two: one to the content and one to the locale.
6: A few extensions might use additional files. TBE, for examplem has a “tabextensions.js” in “[/path/to/firefox]/defaults/pref/” to store its defaults in. Search through your application dir for such files and delete them.
7: Restart Mozilla Firefox.
It’s probably a good idea to make backups of the files/directories before deleting/changing anything to be able to restore the status quo in case anything goes wrong.
Note: The procedure above applies only to extensions that are installed in the application directory. To remove extensions from the profile, your safest course of action is to create a new profile and transfer over files from the previous one.