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Firefox has completely crashed. Can I uninstall and save my bookmarks and re-install?

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by John99

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My screen is completely gray. The only visible area is the menu bar. I can access bookmarks, but can't navigate to any page.

My screen is completely gray. The only visible area is the menu bar. I can access bookmarks, but can't navigate to any page.

All Replies (2)

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Do not uninstall Firefox. You may lose information and bookmarks especially if you use third party software to do the uninstal.

If you wish to be certain of keeping bookmarks etc. you should manually back up your Firefox profile before you do anything else. Please follow these instructions:

I will get back to you later. I know ther have been questions about white screens not sure if they are a related problem. Meanwhile try to back up yi#or profile, and also try to see if Firefox works in its safe mode - hold the shift key whilst starting Firefox by clicking its icon

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I did not find any further posts about white screens and bookmark problems. Did you try the suggestions in my initial post ?

Did you try reinstalling Firefox again after backing up your profile?

A reinstall itself usually does not help. If Firefox program files are corupted then reinstalling after removing the original Firefox program files may help something we usually refer to as a clean reinstall


Clean Re-Install

Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove your Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. This process does not remove your Firefox profile data (such as bookmarks and passwords), since that information is stored in a different location.

To do a clean reinstall of Firefox, please follow these steps: Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.

  1. Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from mozilla.org (or choose the download for your operating system and language from this page) and save the setup file to your computer.
  2. After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (or open the Firefox menu New Fx Menu and click the close button Close 29).
  3. Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
    • Windows:
      • C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
      • C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
    • Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
    • Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
  4. Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
    1. Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
    2. Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.

More information about reinstalling Firefox can be found here.

WARNING: Do not use a third party uninstaller as part of this process. Doing so could permanently delete your Firefox profile data, including but not limited to, extensions, cache, cookies, bookmarks, personal settings and saved passwords. These cannot be easily recovered unless they have been backed up to an external device! See Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.

Please report back to say if this helped you!

Thank you.