Mac OS X High Sierra: Firefox profile is missing or inaccessible

4 times in the last 2 weeks Firefox has crashed. When I went to relaunch it, I could not! It told me Your FireFox profile is missing or inaccessible.

I tried everything on Mozilla's site, nothing as worked. I have had uninstall all of FF and reinstall Fresh. Such a pain!

One odd think i noticed is that Mozilla says my profile should be located in my user folder on my hard drive in a folder named Library. BUT THERE IS NO LIBRARY FOLDER THERE!

If anyone can help, it would be greatly appreciated!

Gary_Puppet

Posted 2018-03-26T19:19:13.217

Reputation: 11

And what happens when you click on the Show in Finder button? – DavidPostill – 2018-03-26T19:53:07.500

Hi Dave. When I look in the finder Library, YES! There is a Firefox folder and inside there is the Profile folder!!! Now what do i do from there? – Gary_Puppet – 2018-03-26T20:36:22.657

No idea ... I was just curious :) – DavidPostill – 2018-03-26T20:37:14.797

Wha wha WHAAAATTTTTTT???? – Gary_Puppet – 2018-03-26T20:38:33.223

Well I don't use MacOS so can't really help. It was just a hint to click the button to see if a profile existed. – DavidPostill – 2018-03-26T20:39:47.367

Ugh. Well you at least helped me find the profiles so Im better off than i was. Thanks dude – Gary_Puppet – 2018-03-26T20:40:32.833

Answers

There’s two things about that:

First, there’s a lot more files and folders in your user home directors than you actually see when using Finder. Except something between 30 and 50. Library, as you already found out, is of them. It’s actually there, although Mac isn’t showing it to you. You can google how to show hidden folders, or use cmd+G to enter the path of a hidden folder to access it.

Second: Probably your Firefox profile is broken. That might happen because of some weird plugin or anything similar. But you don’t have to delete your old data, Firefox supports multiple “profiles”.

Try creating a new Firefox profile. The Firefox profile is a folder where all your Firefox-Related user data is stored in. You can launch the Firefox Profile Manager be adding -p to the Firefox call. E.g., open a Terminal (Type Terminal in Spotlight) and enter the following command:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -p

Then the Firefox profile manager appears. Click “create new profile” (or however it is called in your language) and follow the profile creation assistant. Name the profile whatever you want, but make sure to leave the location as the default. Then select the new profile in the Firefox profile manager, make sure “Automatically use this profile on startup” is checked (or however it is called) and click “Launch Firefox”. Now, Firefox should load as normal again.

LukeLR

Posted 2018-03-26T19:19:13.217

Reputation: 1 233