After a few frustrating days of having the WordPress (flash) file uploader crash Firefox on every attempt, I finally stumbled across a (hopefully short-term) solution: disabling the Firefox Google Gears extension.
Anyone who is running a self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com blog and has installed Google Gears to enable / use WordPress’ Turbo feature should be aware of this issue.
The strangest part…the issue seems to have come out of the blue. Who knows – maybe Vista Service Pack 2 is to blame?! 
Although, as much fun as it is to blame Vista, in all fairness, I did have the same issue on my older XP machine as well.
It’s not clear where the fault lies – is it WordPress, Adobe Flash, Google Gears, and/or a Mozilla Firefox issue? – but disabling Gears seems to be the best solution @ the moment. Hopefully one of the involved parties will figure out how to prevent this from happening, sooner than later.
[via Vectoralia]
Same exact problem & it started about 3 days ago.
If you use Firefox perhaps you can vote for my bug rpt (that’s assuming there’s some way FF can fix this & it’s not a Microsoft caused issue):
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=495646
Actually, this afflicts wordpress.com blogs as well as self-hosted. Frustrating is right!
@Dave: Thanks for the heads-up, I’ve edited the post accordingly.
Nope, it’s not Vista. I have the very same problem and I use XP Home.
I only use Google gears for the offline-version of Gmail and thats when it started for me. Its the only Gears application I’ve messed with (and recent)so I was lucky and isolated it in only a few hours…. then found its a common problem all of a sudden.
Disabling Gears stopped the crashing problem but also got rid of some useful tools in the visual editor, namely the little Edit Photo icon that comes up when you click on the photo. I found that useful for resizing the large photo so that it would display in within the 640 px boundaries of my blog, but also display at full size when someone clicked on it. I know there are HTML ways to do this and such, but I like the quick and easy one.
I am having the same problem too, hopefully whosever fault is, they’ll get this issue to be fixed asap.. as its pretty much frustrating as wordpress loads slower without google gears.
Thanks a million! What a frustrating pain in the neck this has been. I’ve now disabled gears and voila, I can upload images again. I’d switched to Chrome in the interim, but it’s just not the same.
Having the same problem here!
o crap, this is why I always crash.. ~_~ thanks for this post. I have disabled Google gears now.
How do you disable google gears and/or firefox 3.5 when you never downloaded it???
I did upgrade to the IE 8, and then my problems started…I can’t get to any of my secure pages now, because it give me this message:
**Due to a specific problem with Google Gears, Offline Charting is not supported in Firefox 3.5.**
Anyone know what the hell that means?
Neither of those things are in my Control Panel, therefore, I can’t remove them…
I did “Go Back”, my PC to 10 days ago…Nada…Nothing helps….
Any suggestions, are greatly appreciated…
Thanks