This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Cuireadh an snáithe seo sa chartlann. Cuir ceist nua má tá cabhair uait.

My Firefox profile cannot be loaded. Cannot start Firefox or profile manager, have followed other articles

more options

After a long time, I've decided to reinstall Firefox on my PC. Upon installing it, I got the error "Your firefox profile cannot be loaded. it may be missing or inaccessible." I cannot start Firefox.

After looking online, I found this article on the support page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-run-firefox-when-profile-missing-inaccessible

I tried opening the profile manager, but can't get to it since Firefox won't start. It also is not accessible through using "firefox.exe -P" in the run dialog box.

So then I followed the directions and found my existing profiles.ini which pointed to my profile file. Wondering if it got corrupted, I changed the file extension to profiles.iniold and moved the whole mozilla folder to my desktop. Firefox continued to give me the same error message.

Finally I uninstalled firefox, deleted the mozilla folder under %appdata%, deleted the Mozilla folder under %programdata%, and deleted any mention of Mozilla in regedit. I finally reinstalled a fresh copy of firefox... and I got the same profile cannot be loaded error.

Is there somewhere that I'm not seeing that needs to be deleted to finally get a fresh install? I don't care about the original profile and am happy to start from scratch, but have no idea what I can still do in order to get to that point. Any suggestions on what I can do to completely remove any remnants of the original install from years ago?

After a long time, I've decided to reinstall Firefox on my PC. Upon installing it, I got the error "Your firefox profile cannot be loaded. it may be missing or inaccessible." I cannot start Firefox. After looking online, I found this article on the support page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-run-firefox-when-profile-missing-inaccessible I tried opening the profile manager, but can't get to it since Firefox won't start. It also is not accessible through using "firefox.exe -P" in the run dialog box. So then I followed the directions and found my existing profiles.ini which pointed to my profile file. Wondering if it got corrupted, I changed the file extension to profiles.iniold and moved the whole mozilla folder to my desktop. Firefox continued to give me the same error message. Finally I uninstalled firefox, deleted the mozilla folder under %appdata%, deleted the Mozilla folder under %programdata%, and deleted any mention of Mozilla in regedit. I finally reinstalled a fresh copy of firefox... and I got the same profile cannot be loaded error. Is there somewhere that I'm not seeing that needs to be deleted to finally get a fresh install? I don't care about the original profile and am happy to start from scratch, but have no idea what I can still do in order to get to that point. Any suggestions on what I can do to completely remove any remnants of the original install from years ago?

All Replies (2)

more options

Are you possibly using the Firefox MSIX version from the MS store as that version keeps the profile in a different location ?

You can find the full installer of the current Firefox release (109.0) in all languages and all operating systems here:

more options

I don't believe I'm using the MSIX version. I downloaded the installer from here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

I did try downloading the full installer of version 109.0, but still have the "Your firefox profile cannot be loaded. it may be missing or inaccessible." error notification.