21.10 Firefox Missing Profiles

Question

I upgraded 21.04 to 21.10 and have a couple of issues which I'll separate out. The first is Firefox will not launch. Or rather it does, but only to give the error

Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.

There doesn't seem to be any way around the error message. I had Firefox running successfully under 21.04 before the upgrade.

It could have to do with the fact that firefox is now installed as a snap instead of a deb-package. Depending on the location of your profile (snaps only have access to $HOME by default) you may need to configure permissions of the firefox snap. Alternatively you can still install the deb package. See the Releae Notes and this discourse. — mook765, Oct 15 '21 at 22:34
What do you get if you open a terminal and type sudo firefox -P — darth_epoxy, Oct 15 '21 at 23:53
Does sudo apt install firefox && sudo snap remove firefox work? — Archisman Panigrahi, Oct 16 '21 at 01:14
Firefox lost passwords, saved tabs, settings after upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04. I've lost everything too (now trying to get stuff manually from my profile), snaps are bogged. — Velkan, Apr 23 '22 at 13:58

score 6 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 21 '22 at 07:53

6

I had the same issue. Here is what I did to quickly fix this issue.

Uninstall firefox snap with:
```
sudo snap remove firefox
```
Install firefox snap with:
```
sudo snap install firefox
```
Run snap with:
```
snap run firefox
```

With the last command you should see the following lines in the terminal:

Importing existing firefox profiles from /home/xxxxxxx/.mozilla/firefox
Found default profile: xxxxxxxx.default
Import done in 1.826 s

After that all bookmarks and login/password should be back.

edited Jan 21 '22 at 07:53

Error404

7,440

answered Oct 18 '21 at 00:09

Mathieu

161

You have to do this while the previous .deb version is installed still! See https://askubuntu.com/a/1289004/14747. In 22.04 I had to reinstall the firefox .deb using these instructions: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-deb-apt-ubuntu-22-04 . I also had to use the --allow-downgrade flag according to here: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/how-to-fix-an-upgraded-firefox-profile/ – krumpelstiltskin May 02 '22 at 11:48
1

In my case during upgrade 20.04.5 > 22.04.1 profiles were not transferred for other than the primary user. The even faster fix was: 1. close firefox 2. rm -rf ~/snap/firefox 3. snap run firefox (import will start). See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1969910 --- Note: I would be afraid that sudo snap remove firefox could affect profiles of all the users on the system :( – pabouk - Ukraine stay strong Oct 17 '22 at 19:38
@pabouk-Ukrainestaystrong thanks a lot for your comment - I made it into an answer :) – Victor Parmar Nov 01 '22 at 14:35
The fix @Mathieu posted worked for me in a UTM-launched aarch64 Ubuntu 22.04 (and as a bonus it doesn't directly mess with the snap implementation which theoretically could change in future), though my CLI error was a bit different: ```missing profile snap.firefox.firefox. Please make sure that the snapd.apparmor service is enabled and started
– pzrq Mar 18 '24 at 09:41

score 5 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 17 '21 at 00:19

5

The Firefox snap app is the default web browser in Ubuntu 21.10. You can uninstall the snap version and install the .deb version with the command:

sudo apt install firefox && sudo snap remove firefox

The .deb version of Firefox should be able to see your profile.

edited Oct 17 '21 at 00:19

karel

114,770

answered Oct 16 '21 at 01:16

Archisman Panigrahi

28,338
18
105
212

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 01 '22 at 14:36

The simplest solution that works for me was as follows:

close firefox
rm -rf ~/snap/firefox
snap run firefox

Upgrade from 20.04.5 > 22.04.1. Per https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1969910 and thanks to @pabouk for the solution above.

21.10 Firefox Missing Profiles

3 Answers3

Linked

Related