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Missing Profile Manager and I've Done Everything Recommended (I think)

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Totally without reason, out of the blue, I started up Firefox and got the dreaded "profile missing" message. I carefully read everything I could about it in the help files did everything suggested: deleted every possible Firefox file even in the "secret library" ... did a clean install ... still keeps popping up.

Everything was working just fine. I've not upgraded the OS lately. I have done nothing to the computer. No crashes. Nothing.

My system is a iMac running OS 10.14.15

Totally without reason, out of the blue, I started up Firefox and got the dreaded "profile missing" message. I carefully read everything I could about it in the help files did everything suggested: deleted every possible Firefox file even in the "secret library" ... did a clean install ... still keeps popping up. Everything was working just fine. I've not upgraded the OS lately. I have done nothing to the computer. No crashes. Nothing. My system is a iMac running OS 10.14.15

All Replies (3)

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First things first, you will probably need to use the Profile Manager to create a new blank profile so that you will be able to load into Firefox.

After that, the next step would be to navigate to your profile folder (typically located in the Application Support folder on Mac). You'll want to check if you have more than one profile folder located in there.

If you do, it's likely that the file Firefox uses to keep track of where your profile folders are located has been damaged for some reason. The easiest solution, in that case, would be to copy the contents of your previous profile folder into your new profile folder, allowing it to overwrite the blank profile.

Hope this helps.

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Thank you for your response. Please tell me how to use "Profile Manager" ... I downloaded a "Profile Manager" and it was not compatible with my OS. Can you point me to one that is?

I have deleted any/all Firefox profiles in the support folder.

I do not have the previous profile folder.

I deleted everything "Firefox" on my Mac.

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The Firefox Profile Manager is builtin, see:

This is normally a problem with the profiles.ini file that registers all available profiles. If the profile marked as default in profiles.ini isn't found then you will see this error message.