Something mighty strange just happened with my new iMac

A

adiliegro

macrumors newbie
I downloaded firefox and when the download finished, I had the drive on the desktop and a box opened up with the firefox icon in it. I clicked it thinking it would open the program, but nothing happened. I then saw my dock and the little firefox icon would jump once and dissappear and it kept doing that like ever other second. I tried to stop it, but to no avail. Wouldnt let me trash the box or eject the drive from the desktop. I then tried to force quit it, but an error came back and said that firefox cancelled the forcequit. I ended up having to cold shutdown by holding the button on the back of the machine.

Any thoughts on why this may have happened?
 
did you drag/drop the icon from the image drive to your desktop or harddrive first before opening? possible reason. dunno.
 
This happened to me last time i tried firefox. I ended up just having to restart my computer and delete it.
 
I think that happens when you try and launch Firefox from the Disk Image before putting it on the Desktop or Applications folder.

If you drag it on to the Desktop, and launch it, the Firefox icon appears and disappears once from the dock, then lauches Firefox. It must be some setup thing that it runs the first time.
 
thats happened once or twice to me before, not with this program specifically. i never found the reason why
 
That happened to my girlfriend too. Safari was giving her problems, so I told her to download Firefox and it did the same thing as mentioned above. She restarted, deleted it, downloaded Camino and now she's happy. I think it's because Firefox (on first run) loads a bunch of files into the ~/Library folder ~/*user name*/Library and ~/System/Library folders. It can't write from the disk image, so it can't copy the files, so it can't load.

Just my thoughts on it, I can't test it because I don't have a Mac. I WILL VERY VERY SOON THOUGH!!!! :D
 
continuum said:
i've never done this but i'm curious...can a program be loaded from the disk image?
Click to expand...
Yeah, I've done it for a few programs, but apparently it doesn't work for all of them for some reason.
 
Found this on Mozilla's support site

Same thing happened to me, and I took a look on the Mozilla support site. Haven't tried it myself (since I now know what I have to do to prevent the problem), so no promises!

"quitting the application is another matter when it's bouncing... I use terminal: 2 windows. on the first, I run "top -u" and make mental note of the PID of FireFox. on the second "kill -9 " and some number that's bigger than the noted pid, when pid reaches next to last (your number -1) hit enter, FF should have then relaunched and the kill signal reached it:)

You need to quit the application, (firefox) and eject the disc. You should have the firefox.dmg file on your desktop. Double click it and drag the FireFox application icon to your Applications folder. Eject the disc. You can then drag an alias of the Firefox application to your dock."
 
kgarner said:
Yeah, I've done it for a few programs, but apparently it doesn't work for all of them for some reason.
Click to expand...

Just a thought - could it be because disk images can be either read/write or read-only. I could imagine launching some apps from a read-only disk image might not work.
 
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