As I recall, Firefox 3 worked just fine with Ubuntu 8.04; but Firefox 3.5 sure seems to be tired (all the time crashing and often moving r-e-a-l s-l-o-w; sometimes when I don't touch the keyboard for over 15 minutes, it freezes up and I have to restart) Could it be Shiretoko? I have a Shiretoko icon and a Firefox icon (actually 8 of them) on my panel. I can't disable Shiretoko or remove it, either. Add/remove in Applications flat-out won't do it; and Synaptic Package Manager warns not to remove Firefox. I thought I'd remove Shiretoko and see how Firefox does alone, and/or vice versa. 9.04

Which Firefox package(s) are you trying to remove in Synaptic? You should be removing firefox-3.5 and, if you have it installed, firefox-3.1, as well as their corresponding -branding, -gnome-support, -dbg, and -dev packages. Leave the packaged called firefox and firefox-3.0 installed.

What exactly is the wording of the warning Synaptic gives you?

I actually had trouble with Firefox 3.5 on a Windows XP system at work. I just completely uninstalled all versions of Firefox and reinstalled it cleanly. It works fine now.

Try creating a new clean profile for Firefox with no extension in it.. see if the issue goes away.

if so then add you extensions back in one at a time, to see if the problem comes back.

Firefox crashing for no apparent reason has always been related to a bad profile when I've run into those issues.

I've been able to remove Firefox 3.5; I'm doing 3.0 now and there's no change. The problem may not be Shiretoko.

did you try a clean profile as suggested ? info on how to do so is in the mozilla Knowledge base...

Thanks for all of your help and consideration. What do you mean by "clean profile?"

Like I said it's in the Mozilla Knowledge base...

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles

Follow the direction, start the profile manager and create a new profile