Java JRE is making firefox crash
 

Hi all, I've been using linux only for a couple of months, and I've still learning the basics.

Wanting to program in java (and run applets in my browser), I went and installed the JRE, and in the instructions I was told to make a symbolic link to the java plugin in the firefox plugin directory (libjavaplugin_oji.so was the file), however after doing so, I went to java.com to test to see if it worked, but the the test applet wouldn't run, so I gave up for the time, but when I went to YouTube, firefox crashed before playing a video. And I couldn't start it up except for in safe mode. After uninstalling firefox and reinstalling it it would start normally, but any site with flash or anything fancy immediately crashes firefox. I can't even access the homepage of LinuxQuestions.org (I'm dillo-ing it up right now). it spits out this error message when ran from the prompt:
$ firefox linuxquestions.org
INTERNAL ERROR on Browser End: Could not get the plugin manager
System error?:: Success

I go to tools->addons and there's no java plugin/extension listed. there used to be a java console, but there hasn't been one since I reinstalled it.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could get firefox functional again? Ideally, with java support, but I'll take what I can get.

Thanks in advance for any help you may provide.

~Peaches

welcome! Would be helpful to know which distribution you are using. Did you install firefox manually or with a packet manager supplied by your distro?
If you manually downloaded a recent version of firefox you better throw it away and replace it with the one supplied by your distribution. The problem you are describing points at that...
cheers, j

Sorry, I forgot to mention I'm running Fedora 8.
...and I used the automatic add/remove package manager GUI program that came bundled with my distro to uninstall and reinstall firefox. However, When selected the java packages in the add/remove software program, firefox still couldn't run applets, so that's when I turned to the sun.com and downloaded the java self-extracting shell script and ran that. Shortly after that, everything went to hell...

I'm gonna try uninstalling and reinstalling the java packages from red-hat, and see if that works..