Firefox killed my Internet :(

Question

Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me.  I have an older MacBook pro running 10.5.8 and I installed firefox and my Internet promptly stopped working.  Airport says that I have full reception but whenever I try and use safari or firefox they say they can't connect to the Internet.  Up until downloading firefox I had no issues with anything Internet related.  Now I cannot connect to the Internet on any wifi network.  Could someone please help me fix this? I have removed all traces of firefox and Mozilla hoping to fix this problem.
Thanks,
Elliot

Answer 1

OS X 10.5 "Leopard" is obsolete and insecure, Apple is not paying attention to that version of OS X anymore.
This is the penalty for using Mac's, the machine might still work still but Apple intentionally ignores you for updates and compatibility fixes, drags third party developers along for the ride.
Firefox is not supported on that version, neither is Flash or Silverlight far as I know.
This is the estimated OS X version market share as of the date of this posting.
If your 10.5 machine has Intel processors, Apple sells a 10.6.3 Snow Leopard white retail disk which you can "upgrade" OSX in place and continue to run most of your 10.5 based programs and update OS X to 10.6.8 via Software Update.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard
Apple is issuing security updates and other fixes for 10.6 still, installs a free anti-virus for 10.6.8 and later users.
Firefox is issuing updates for 10.6.8, Flash and Silverlight as well.
Since a 10.5 era issued machine is rather dated and at it's end of life stage, I DO NOT recommend it be further upgraded to 10.7 or 10.8 as this will slow it down considerably, NOT run your PPC based programs of old, require paid upgrades for many softwares and also may brick the machine because of unseen hardware glitches the newer firmware may expose.
I advise to upgrade to 10.6.8 max and run it until the wheels fall off.
I also advise temporarily manually moving your user data out of Pictures, Movies, Documents and Music etc., to a external storage drive (not TimeMachine) and disconnecting this drive BEFORE upgrading OS X 10.5 to 10.6.8.
When one upgrades OS X on a near full boot hard drive, it gets written to the slower part of it, thus your machines performance will seem slow. So by moving your large user data off the hard drive, OS X will write on the faster part of the drive and then you return your user data back which will write on the slower parts of the drive where it's accessed rarely and doesn't affect performance as much.
There is plenty of assistance here, make sure you have another means to access the Internet while upgrading just in case you have problems
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents
OS X gets a upgrade once a year now, if your the type of person that prefers longevity and machines lasting longer in software, then perhaps a Windows 7 machine is better suited as it will receive support and updates until 2020, that's another 7 years. Windows 7 is not the security nightmare of Window XP, however like on OS X one has to maintain System Restore Images (free included) and anti-malware (free Microsoft Security Essentials). Since OS X has free TimeMachine and free anti-virus (for OS X only) and the free ClamXav is avaialble for ridding Windows malware off files you get on OS X, it's all the same now basically.