Firefox, Chrome, Skype keep crashing

Firefox and Chrome crash when visiting almost any sites. Chrome displays characters incorrectly and changing text encoding won't help.

With skype, I can send one message but as soon as it's sent it crashes.

And error message cannot be sent to Apple. Error message I get is "Your report could not be submitted. Please try again later."

I recently did Secure Empty Trash and it included a folder called "Database", if I remember correctly, which could not be deleted by simply trying to empty the trash. Was I not supposed to delete that? How can I resolve the issue?

I'm using;

Mac OS X 10.5.8
Firefox 11.0
Chrome 18.0.1025.163
Skype 5.3.0.1093

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried re-installing Chrome or Firefox?

Thanks for your response, Pigstick. I did reinstall Firefox and made no difference.

I think this issue started when Java Plugin (Mac OS X 10.5) started being blocked due to security issue. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/blocked/p85

Do I have to upgrade OS?

Does Safari work?

Safari has been working flawlessly so far.

On Chrome, if you type in chrome://plugins/ can you see Java enabled or disabled?

Java is enabled on Chrome.