Firefox restarted with the upgrade and loaded the default home page.
Firefox crashed while attempting to load the index page for this forum.
I was unable to resolve the issue at that time.
After reading this thread I created a fresh save file. I installed Firefox 7 from the repo and then permitted it to upgrade to 8.0 with the following results.
Firefox 8.0 worked out of the box. I did launch it from console and received a bug message:
At this point in the test Firefox 8.0 is working quite well.WARNING: Application calling GLX 1.3 function "glXCreatePixmap" when GLX 1.3 is not supported! This is an application bug!
It should be noted that /usr/lib/mozilla/ folder has no flashplayer plugin of any kind. Libflashplayer.so is absent from the plugins folder and there are no extra folders.
I installed flashplayer 11 from a .pet file. It placed libflashplayer.so in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. It did not seed any duplicate files.
I started Firefox 8.0 and it crashed trying to load the forum index page. I received a message when launching Firefox from console identical to the one posted by Geoffrey above regarding wrong version of libnss.so.3.
I followed his instructions and copied libnss.so.3 from /usr/lib/firefox to /usr/lib. This corrected the issue.
I am posting from Firefox 8.0 now.
I have noted that flash does seem a bit slow but there is evidence that my network has slowed down a bit over the last few days.