hello vorth, can you try launching firefox in safe mode by pressing the shift key while it is starting and see if the issue is occurring there too? maybe a theme or hardware acceleration is interfering here...

if safemode is working, you can try disabling hardware acceleration in firefox > options > advanced > general and or disable addons that might cause the problem. it also would be interesting which graphics hardware (adapter description, driver date & driver version) you are using - you can access this information in firefox > help > troubleshooting information towards the bottom of that page... thank you

Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems

Adapter DescriptionATI Radeon HD 5800 SeriesVendor ID0x1002Device ID0x6899Adapter RAM1024Adapter Driversaticfx64 aticfx64 aticfx64 aticfx32 aticfx32 aticfx32 atiumd64 atidxx64 atidxx64 atiumdag atidxx32 atidxx32 atiumdva atiumd6a atitmm64Driver Version9.2.0.0Driver Date9-27-2012Direct2D EnabledfalseDirectWrite Enabledfalse (6.1.7601.17789)ClearType ParametersClearType parameters not foundWebGL RendererGoogle Inc. -- ANGLE (ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series) -- OpenGL ES 2.0 (ANGLE 1.0.0.1242)GPU Accelerated Windows0

       AzureCanvasBackendcairoAzureFallbackCanvasBackendnoneAzureContentBackendnone

and it works in Safemode apparently!

its still opening with the haze when I dont use Safemode...

thanks for reporting back with your details, there seem to be quite a few users affected by this very recently. your ati driver seems to be recently updated, so this might play into the issue. please keep hardware acceleration disabled for the moment, as long as the problem is still under investigation...

it actually asked me to update to catalyst 10 just after it messed up. it was messed up before i updated the driver, i believe i had catalyst 8, and when i got home i had the haze, after the haze i installed the driver notification for the graphics card.

what should i do now?

when you are in safemode and disable hardware acceleration in firefox > options > advanced > general, can you start firefox normally afterwards?

nope,

I disabled it in safemode, tried restarting it in normal mode, still wont open. confirmed that hardware acceleration is disabled

ok, then the focus would shift to addons (themes and extensions). could you copy the whole content of firefox > help > troubleshooting information, paste it on a page like http://pastebin.com/ & provide a link to the page here. thanks

did this work? http://pastebin.com/b0DKbqyE

ive never used it before

try this one http://pastebin.com/XWfB4Cye

yes that did work, in your list of installed addons there's an entry called "General Crawler" which is considered malware and may be related to the issue you've described. in addition there is Codec v1.0 (ID 4f807b7b72d78@4f807b7b72d79.info), which also seems quite suspicious. please try removing those extensions in safemode in firefox > addons > extensions if possible & also do a full scan of your system with your security software already in place and /or the free version of malwarebytes.

for more tips on how to deal with it please also refer to this support question: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/809712

Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware

there is no remove button for general crawler? just "Enable"

i disabled "codec 1" and "general crawler" but it wont let me remove general crawler. opened firefox and it worked

ok, then please do an in-depth scan of your system with different security tools, maybe they are picking up the infection or try following the tips form the thread i've mentioned in my prior reply where users succeeded in manually removing it.

I have Firefox 19.0 and have been experiencing this for a while. It turns out that when I disabled FoxClocks, the problem seems to have gone. will monitor it for a while...