The Firefox reset removed my extensions and the help did not work to bring them back. I need help.
Firefox's performance was super slow on my Macbook Pro and I read that Firefox reset could be used to improve performance. It said it would not damage your existing settings, so I tried it. Well, it did damage my settings, and I lost my extensions. My "One-Tab" extension in particular had a lot of data in in it and I really want to get that back. I followed the help on this to create a new profile and copy the contents of the old one into this one. However, when I did this and set it to my default profile and restarted FF, it still looks like a new setup. None of my extensions are there, yet I copied them into this new profile.
All Replies (5)
The copy method usually works. If Firefox doesn't see the files you copied in, are you sure you replaced all the existing files in the same locations? To put that another way, when you view the profile folder, you should see a folder named extensions, and that should be identical to the extensions folder you copied in from the Old Firefox Data folder.
To view the "live" profile, you can launch Finder using either
- "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
- (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
- type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter
In the first table on the page, click the "Show in Finder" button.
If this folder doesn't have your "old" folders, perhaps it isn't the correct profile, or they are one level down rather than being at that main level?
Note that Firefox uses two locations for the Firefox profile folder, so make sure to look in the correct location.
Location used for the main profile that keeps your personal data in "AppData\Roaming".
- C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
Location used for the disk cache and other temporary files in "AppData\Local".
- C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
Ah, thank you j! That second note helped me a lot. I had used the incorrect directory. Btw, I'm on a Mac so no c:\ drive and the folders are different on a Mac. Anyway, I used the other folder this time, cleaned it out, and used the terminal to copy everything over, reopened FF and everything was back! Thank you.
Any chance Mozilla will refactor Reset so that it doesn't break everything? It did seem to improve the performance, even now, after copying everything back into this new profile.
eddfredd said
Any chance Mozilla will refactor Reset so that it doesn't break everything?
The two main functions of Refresh are: (1) remove extensions, and (2) reset preferences. So if you meant not doing either of those things, I would say no chance.
If anything goes wrong with a refresh then there is either external software interfering or the profile is damaged that much that the profile migrator can't handle it and hangs or crashes or migrates corrupted data (i.e. the problem might persist). That is why I recommend to use the Profile Manager to create a new profile and manually transfer important data to the new profile after you have confirmed that the new profile indeed helps. A long time ago the refresh (reset) kept the original profile in place and it was easy to revert to this profile using the Profile Manager, but at one time (14?) they decided to move the old profile to the desktop.