Firefox hates me

Nothing ever goes right when I try to use Firefox. I don't know why. I never do anything that exotic. But for some reason, it always falls short.

This time, it's the new RSS features in Firefox 2. You click on a feed link and you get a nice, readable display of the content with a "Subscribe Now" button at the top that lets you subscribe to it with several online services or allows you to pick a desktop application. However, in my case, it doesn't work.

And when I say "doesn't work" I don't mean it doesn't work as well as I'd like, or that it pops up an error message. I mean it does absolutely nothing. I open a feed, point Firefox to a script to add it to Akregator, click the "Subscribe Now" button and...nothing. Absolutely nothing happens.

I know it's not the script, because it works perfectly on the command line. I know it's not something in my profile because I already tried doing this from a blank profile. The only conclusion is that the Ubuntu Edgy Firefox package is broken.

There was one piece of feedback I turned up. After clicking the subscribe button, two instances of an extremely obscure error message show up in the error console. The exact text is:
Error: [Exception... "ServiceManager::GetService returned failure code:" nsresult: "0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: file:///usr/lib/firefox/components/FeedConverter.js :: FRS_addToClientReader :: line 338" data: no]
Source File: file:///usr/lib/firefox/components/FeedConverter.js
Line: 338

The referenced line of code is this:
var ss = Cc["@mozilla.org/browser/shell-service;1"]
.getService(Ci.nsIShellService_MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH);

I have absolutely no idea why this is failing or how to fix it. That is particularly frustrating because it's the only thing I have to go on. Does anybody else have a clue?

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