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"Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible" - Firefox not working on new Mac

  • 4 iimpendulo
  • 86 inale ngxaki
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  • Impendulo yokugqibela ngu annaleighclark

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I have a new MacBook Pro with OS 10.8.5. Data was moved from my 2008 MacBook (where Firefox worked perfectly) to this one. Several attempts to uninstall and re-install Firefox get the above error message. A previous thread indicated that someone was able to fix this by creating a new profile. I tried this, using these instructions - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager - but I get an error message when I try to do this in Terminal:

"Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory. Profile Missing: Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible."

The Support on this site only troubleshoots this Profile Manager issue by saying I must have Firefox on in the background to get this error, but I do not.

Help, please?

I have a new MacBook Pro with OS 10.8.5. Data was moved from my 2008 MacBook (where Firefox worked perfectly) to this one. Several attempts to uninstall and re-install Firefox get the above error message. A previous thread indicated that someone was able to fix this by creating a new profile. I tried this, using these instructions - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager - but I get an error message when I try to do this in Terminal: "Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory. Profile Missing: Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible." The Support on this site only troubleshoots this Profile Manager issue by saying I must have Firefox on in the background to get this error, but I do not. Help, please?

All Replies (4)

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Make sure that you have write access to the profiles.ini file.

Try to repair the disk permissions:

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Yes, I've tried to create a new profile in Profile Manager, using Terminal, but I get this error message when I do so:

"Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory. Profile Missing: Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible."

The Support on this site only troubleshoots this Profile Manager issue by saying I must have Firefox on in the background to get this error, but I do not.

So, how do I get around this roadblock?

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cor-el, I'll look into this today and post an update. Thanks!