Saturday, October 20, 2007

Google Maps not Showing in Firefox?

Is anyone having this problem too? Google Maps comes up completely blank in my Firefox. This blog post is discussing the same issue and refers to a page in Maps Help saying that the problem is in one of the configuration parameters. I changed it to the suggested value...No luck. The page also says that one of the installed plugins might be the cause. Makes sense. I started a fresh Firefox instance as a different user, and lo and behold, Maps works just as advertised. It has to be one of the plugins then. I installed all the active plugins I use on the fresh Firefox instance, anticipating that Maps screws up once the guilty plugin is installed, but it just didn't happen :( These are the plugins I have installed, if someone has an idea then please post a comment:
  • Theme: macfoxII
  • DOM Inspector
  • Download Manager Tweak
  • DownThemAll!
  • Firebug
  • Gmail Manager
  • Google Browser Sync
  • Google Gears
  • Greasemonkey
  • JavaScript Debugger
  • Tamper Data
  • User Agent Switcher
  • VideoDownloader
UPDATE: Mystery Solved!

There was a flaw in my testing methodology after installing each plugin: it's not enough to see images appearing in Maps. Those that I used to see were cached ones, but when I zoom or pan, the same problem occurs. By disabling plugins one by one, I found that the guilty one is ... DOM Inspector! Which is strange, because it's a very old (and supposedly mature) plugin developed by mozilla.og themselves. However, to be fair & not hurt the reputation of a plugin that I personally like & have relied on a lot, the problem might be more convoluted, or might only occur when certain plugins are mixed, or whatever. Anyway, since I don't have time to investigate more into this, and since a better alternative exists, I declare victory and stop at this point :)

1 comments:

Ira said...

Was having the same problem. I did not have the DOM inspector installed so that was not the issue. The issue for me was skype's integration with Firefox.