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

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Firefox 12.0 cannot load on Mac OS 10.6.8. It comes up with the Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible. Even if I run the profile manager.

Firefox 12.0 cannot load on Mac OS 10.6.8. It comes up with the Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible. Even if I run the profile manager.

All Replies (13)

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I've tried: Reimaging Reinstalling to 18.0 Restarting /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -p Copy and pasted a working profile into the default location then chowning folder sudo chown -R `id -un`:`id -gn` ~ What temporarily works is /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager /temp/default however it will close as soon as terminal closes and then comes up with the same missing profile error on attempted restart of firefox.

What I've noticed is that the image and firefox will work on macs that are newer rather than older. For instance it wont work on the old macbooks and iMacs but on the newer iMac the exact same image will work. Any help is appreciated, I work for a school district and they need firefox working.

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Tried it, no luck.

I've tried renaming the profile.ini and it still wont open both firefox and the profilemanager having the same error come up.

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Try to repair the disk permissions:

Does Firefox create an new profiles.ini file and a new default profile?

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I've tried a repair disk permissions nothing.

Firefox does not create a new profile.ini or a new profile it just pops up with the error before doing anything.

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can you open the profile.ini file (it is a text file, it can be easily opened, viewed and edited, with a text editor) and see if the values within is correct ? (see: Here are two examples of the profiles.ini file contents....) if it is not correct, can you correct the values ?

if you correct the values can firefox open ?

if not(with correct values) try to Creating a profile that is not listed in the Profile Manager

if doesn't work try to Modify profiles.ini to point to the new location - Advanced

YES it is not easy at all !


thanks and sorry if i confusing you

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Try to delete the Firefox folder:

  • /Users/<user>/Library/Application Support/Firefox

Try to remove the Firefox plist file (org.mozilla.firefox.plist).

Go to "~/Library/Preferences" and remove the plist file for Firefox (org.mozilla.firefox.plist)

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Mmm i'll try removing the plist tomorrow.

And I've checked the ini file all the links are correct in it.

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Removing the plist and deleting the folder still comes up with the same error both when trying to load the application and the terminal the profile manager.

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Did you try to delete the main Firefox folder?

  • /Users/<user>/Library/Application Support/Firefox
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Yup I also tried deleting the main Firefox folder, restarted, didn't work, reinstalled, didn't work. And this is not an issue on one computer but on ALL computers that have this particular image with firefox. We have probably 100 computers deployed out with this image of firefox.

I was hoping to get a solution to apply to all the computers not having to create a vanilla image from scratch.

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Only thing that has worked thus far is a vanilla reinstall of the OS. Any other options to try?

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Here's a fix:

From the finder go up to the GO menu while holding down "alt" so that library appears. Choose it.

Delete the caches folder, which in fact may look like an alias file. Simply delete it and problem solved.

Rocket Science!!!