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Firefox on OSX will run with sudo, but not without. Without sudo, a standard "Profile Missing" error appears.

I recently moved to a new Macbook, and I cannot get Firefox to start unless I run it with sudo.

Under osx, I looked in /Users/steven/Library/Application Support/Firefox and the profile was there, but still not working. I attempted removing the Firefox folder and the .plist file, and it still failed.

I've looked at other support questions that are similar, most notably https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/951989?esab=a&as=aaq - but that's the wrong OS for me.

What I need now, I think, is a list of what folder locations and permissions *should* be set on osx, because I know that it's going to be permissions since it runs perfectly as root. Have any of you encountered this particular scenario before, and if so, how did you fix it?

I recently moved to a new Macbook, and I cannot get Firefox to start unless I run it with sudo. Under osx, I looked in /Users/steven/Library/Application Support/Firefox and the profile was there, but still not working. I attempted removing the Firefox folder and the .plist file, and it still failed. I've looked at other support questions that are similar, most notably https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/951989?esab=a&as=aaq - but that's the wrong OS for me. What I need now, I think, is a list of what folder locations and permissions *should* be set on osx, because I know that it's going to be permissions since it runs perfectly as root. Have any of you encountered this particular scenario before, and if so, how did you fix it?

Chosen solution

Solved!

Jscher2000 was right. Even though everything said "steven:staff," it wasn't quite happy. This is what finally fixed it:

Yori-20:Firefox steven$ sudo chown -R steven:staff ~/Library/ Yori-20:Firefox steven$

After that, it loaded perfectly.

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All Replies (5)

Hmmm, I think the problem might be that the old you is the owner of those copied folders rather than the new you. Does the procedure described in these article help you take control of them?

Check the permissions of the profiles.ini file and the files in the Firefox profile folder.

You can also try to repair the disk permissions:


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

In Mac OS X v10.7 and later, the $HOME/Library folder is a hidden folder.

jscher2000: Both old me and new me are the same text userID (steven) on the machine, and the directory ownerships appear correct as far as I can tell. Problem is, I don't know what the perms *should* be.

Yori-20:Application Support steven$ pwd
/Users/steven/Library/Application Support

Yori-20:Application Support steven$ ls -alh Firefox/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x+   5 steven  staff   170B Nov 13 09:33 .
drwx------+ 142 steven  staff   4.7K Nov 13 20:21 ..
drwx------+   3 steven  staff   102B Nov 13 09:32 Crash Reports
drwxr-xr-x+   4 steven  staff   136B Nov 13 21:02 Profiles
-rw-rw-rw-+   1 steven  staff   123B Nov 13 20:11 profiles.ini
Yori-20:Application Support steven$

Modified by cor-el

I'm starting to think that the problem isn't actually in the Profiles directory. On my Mac, I did this:

  1. Created a test user
  2. On that test user, ran the *same* Firefox binary from /Applications
  3. Verified that it created a profile directory and that it worked.
  4. Compared the permissions for every part of the path /Users/$USERID/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles between the two users.
  5. Renamed the broken Firefox dir to Firefox.bad
  6. Copied the working one into place with rsync, then using recursive chown to make sure it was owned by the steven user.
  7. Same error as before.

Chosen Solution

Solved!

Jscher2000 was right. Even though everything said "steven:staff," it wasn't quite happy. This is what finally fixed it:

Yori-20:Firefox steven$ sudo chown -R steven:staff ~/Library/ Yori-20:Firefox steven$

After that, it loaded perfectly.