https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/121413

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-mozillateam-bugs/2007-June/016597.html

Symptoms: Eclipse completely dies on you when you open a web browser or one is opened for you. It also happens if you go to the web browser settings page.

Failed possible solutions: Recompiling everything. It looked like a weird linking problem to me so I went for the traditional response, recompile. This wasted a lot of CPU time but gained me nothing.

Solution: Surprisingly I’ve yet to see this anywhere else on the Internet. The problem seems to be somewhere within the ~/.mozilla/eclipse/ directory, if you remove it completely then it’s replaced and everything starts working fine again. I haven’t gone deeper into it to find out what’s actually causing this or if there’s a better solution. However, I don’t think I missed anything in that directory and Eclipse is working perfectly again.

Conclusion

I know this set me back a few hours in work figuring it out, I know that there are a lot of Eclipse developers out there who may benefit from this as well.

This must be quite a complex bug as nobody on IRC seemed to know what to do. Hopefully this guide will help other people with problems.

Comments welcome.

Kind regards, Robert.