Firefox Deletes Printers!

Back when I did tech support, one of my customers was a master of BSing. Well, more an apprentice — he has all the words down, but couldn’t quite string them together into anything coherent. He’s told me to “double delete the TCP stack” more than once. Also, he claims to program operating systems in his spare time and to be one of the inventors of the internet. Something about his support calls leads me to believe he may be exaggerating…

Customer: One of your guys installed this Firefox and it broke my printer, can you give me a direct link to the driver?
Arthur (googling the Canon MP780 driver): No problem, if you just go to Google and search for-
Customer: I don’t want to do that. Can you just give me the direct URL?
Arthur: Actually, it’s kind of a long URL…
Customer: That’s fine.

Rather than repeat a long URL, I made a shortcut on tinyurl.

Arthur: OK, type in T I N Y U R L . C O M / J H D W A
Customer: It’s not working!
Arthur: Are you sure you spelled it right? T I N Y-
Customer: …Oh! Tinyurl! T I N Y U R L / J H D W A? It’s still not working.
Arthur: Did you get the .com after tinyurl?
Customer: *angrily muttering incoherently before hanging up the phone*

He called back just a few minutes later…

Customer: It says I can’t install this driver because it exceeds 128 characters!
Arthur: I-
Customer: This is a known issue right on the Mozilla website that when Firefox is installed it disables your printers and redirects it to an omni page!
Arthur: Really? I’ve installed Firefox on hundreds of computers and never heard of this problem. Can you send me the link so I can alert my other customers? This is a major issue!
Customer: Well I’ve been spending all day trying to fix this printing problem and I’m trying to make money…
Arthur: Yes, I understand that is a problem. Did you maybe download the 64 bit version of the driver instead of the Windows XP one?
Customer: Oh… yeah, let me try this other one and see if it works, Thanks.

The customer was also embarrassed to realize that he hadn’t tried a crucial troubleshooting step — double deleting the TCP stack.

Contributed by Arthur

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5. A Case of Lost Bookmarks after Firefox 3.5.2 Upgrade

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