Back when I installed Windows 10 1809 update I was all happy of having updated my operating system.

Until I actually started using the system: all browsers except Microsoft’s stopped working, plus thunderbid was also down, and several other applications I couldn’t remember.

I resetted the settings, reinstalled from scratch, but nothing helped.

So I rolled back to the previous state, and everything was back to normal.

A few days ago Windows 10 plainly told me “update now to latest release or your version will have no more support”

YIKES MUST UPDATE NNNNOOOOOWWWWW

Fast forward to 1903 version, Firefox and Chrome started AGAIN not even being able to boot, and Thunderbird wasn’t that snappy either.

I wasn’t up to rolling back AGAIN to 1803.

I deleted for both Firefox and Chrome the original profiles, and the browsers appeared to be starting again, but after a while they kept randomly crashing and not being able to be opened at all.

Browsing around I found a lot of people having similar problems, and a lot supposed solutions… that didn’t work: reset DNS cache, delete profiles, disable CFG (control flow guard), blah blah blah.

But I tried compatibility mode, setting it for Windows 8. Chrome started working again but I didn’t like the window title bar that was imposed on me with that, so I also tried disabling compatibility mode, and instead I disabled “full screen optimizations”, and BAM Chrome worked even out of Windows 8 compatibility mode, and even after restoring the old profile! (which I had simply renamed)

Then it was the turn of Firefox: disabling full screen optimizations wasn’t enough, but enabling Windows 8 compatibility mode let me restore the old profile alright.

Thank you Windows!