Hi Bill, sorry to hear about the inconvenience. It's difficult to imagine why current add-ons from the official site would go missing. Do you Sync your Firefox with another installation?

If you were not so far along, I would suggest the following as the first step. I guess it might still be worth a look:

First, close out of Firefox and do a normal Windows shutdown and restart to complete any pending updates and release any file locks.

If Firefox again starts up without your old data, could you check whether your stuff is available in a different profile, as follows:

Profile Manager Page

Inside Firefox, type or paste about:profiles in the address bar and press Enter/Return to load it.

This page should list at least one profile and could list many. (Each profile has two folders and one or more buttons. Do not use any Remove buttons!)

The profile that Firefox is currently using will have this:

This is the profile in use and it cannot be deleted.

Do you have any other profile(s) listed on this page? If so, you can check whether it is the one you were using recently by clicking its Launch profile in new browser button.

If it isn't what you want, simply close that new window.

If it IS what you want, back on the about:profiles page, click the Set as default profile button for that profile so Firefox uses it automatically at the next startup.

Any interesting discoveries so far?

See also:

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recover-user-data-missing-after-firefox-update

Well, this is pretty funky. My profile(s) are located on a NAS drive within our network. So, when I look at the profile (via about:profiles) the output shows my profile is in the junk-file "C:\users\{myuserid}\..." This leads me to think that Firefox is copying the entire profile there. Why would it do that?

My local profile is located on "D:\Firefox\Data\Profile". I keep a copy of the NAS "Data" folder locally (just in case) and I named it "Data_local". The NAS "Data" folder is physically located on the NAS drive and the local "Data" folder is defined as a Windows "symlink" to the NAS "Data" folder. So, when I want to test Firefox with a new profile I simply rename the symlink "Data" to "Data_nas" then rename the "Data_local" to "Data" then restart Firefox. It uses the new profile.

I don't know where the "C:\users\{myloginid}\..." path is coming from. But the add-ons were loaded when I switched profiles to use the "Data_local" profile (copied it to "Data" first after copying "Data" to "Data_nas").

So, once again, I'm quite confused.  :-(

Normally, all your important Firefox data is under

C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\

In that folder, you will find profiles.ini and installs.ini storing the physical locations of your profile folders.

Now... I don't understand what you are saying about the symlink, but either the symlink is doing an excellent job of fooling Firefox, or there is a risk that it is flaky and could be causing intermittent inability to find your profile.

Hmm. A Windows symlink is where you create a link in a windows partition that points somewhere else. So, for instance, if one doesn't want Google to install on one's "C:\" drive then create a Windows symlink from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google" to somewhere else like "D:\Google". Then anything installed in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google" will actually be loaded into "D:\Google".

In this instance, I've created a symlink for "D:\Firefox\Data" to actually reside on "\\MyNasDrive\Browsers\Firefox\Data". This gets backed up every night and has saved me countless problems in the past, not just with Firefox but a whole slew of other software applications.

So, out of the blue, after years and years, Firefox updates and I lose Ghostery, AdBlock Ultimate, and Highlight or Hide Search Engine Results from the extensions installed with Firefox. I restored the backup of my Firefox profile from a week ago (from our NAS drive) and the extensions appeared.

The only cause of this issue I can think of is the update of Firefox to v103.0 a day or so ago. This is not the end of the world but it seems every day I have to deal with some technological issue or another before I can do anything...and it's getting real tiresome. Sigh...

Thanks,

In this instance, I've created a symlink for "D:\Firefox\Data" to actually reside on "\\MyNasDrive\Browsers\Firefox\Data".

Okay, this is not lining up yet. You manually created your profile folder(s) in "D:\Firefox\Data" but based on what you see on the about:profiles page, Firefox thinks that all of them are in the default location (%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles)? Or does it have the Root path in AppData and the Local path on the NAS? Or ???

If a profile is in the default location in "AppData\Roaming" (in profiles.ini there is a relative path) then Firefox uses a secondary location in "AppData\Local" for the temporary files. If an absolute path is used in profiles.ini for the profile then all the files will be in that location (i.e. there is no secondary location). The profiles.ini file that registers all the profile will normally always be in "AppData\Roaming".

• %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
  C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\

Are you redirecting that path as well to the D-drive ?

I did not redirect that path in the "\Roaming" directory's "profile.ini" file. Firefox is installed as a portable app and I was under the impression that everything is saved within "D:\Firefox". This appears to be an inaccurate assumption. I didn't want Firefox to be controlled by Microsoft but wanted everything to be located where I wanted it (so I could go onto the road). When I alter the "D:\Firefox\Data" directory to point someplace else everything in Firefox changes. When I point the "Data" directory somewhere else this new "Data" location has controlled the look and feel of Firefox. So I had the impression that where I was locating the "Data" folder was interpreted by Firefox.

Okay, that explains a lot. We do not support the PortableApps version of Firefox. I mean, we can troubleshoot some issues, but it has a lot of nonstandard configuration. You can ask on their forums.

But before you go: Is it possible that you have two installations of Firefox, one PortableApps version and one regular version? On the Troubleshooting Information page, check the "Application Binary" row to make sure you are running the expected firefox.exe.

Thank you. It is running the proper binary in "D:\Firefox\App\firefox64\firefox.exe". They aren't too helpful because there is enough going on nobody seems to know why these little glitches keep appearing. Thank goodness Thunderbird portable gives me zero trouble as I've been using that for over twenty years.  :-)

Thanks again.

Sorry to hear that you had trouble with the recent update to Firefox. It sounds like you may have had some add-ons that were not compatible with the new version and were therefore removed. We recommend checking the compatibility of your add-ons before updating Firefox to avoid this issue in the future. As for your passwords, I recommend using a password manager to keep them safe and secure.