
accidentally uninstalled firefox
I accidentally uninstalled firefox and need to recover passwords and bookmarks. Can this be done? I run an old dell latitude with Windows 10 and was trying to cleanup apps running in background at startup since it was running very slowly. At one point I saw 2 firefox icons. Uninstalled one and lost everything. Can you help me. Michael Evans
All Replies (5)
You have to reinstall Firefox browser again to get access to those data to export them or save them. And did it remove the mozilla folder when you did this?
Mark, I have reinstalled Firefox, found my profile data on my C drive, and copied it to a memory card USB but I am not sure what to do next.
This disaster happened yesterday.
Well did you try to copy it back to the right locations to and run Firefox again? This might or might not work as this sometimes can corrupt Firefox.
Hi Michael, normally when you uninstall Firefox (using its uninstaller, not a third party program), it preserves your data unless you instruct it to delete your data. And then the installer automatically detects your data and proceeds to use it.
When reinstalling, did you get any error messages about not being able to find your profile, or needing to create a new profile, etc.?
Assuming not, where did you back up your profile(s) from? Firefox uses two parallel folders:
- C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox => this has your important data
- C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox => this has temporary files
You typically need to turn on viewing of hidden files and folders to follow those paths: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/view-hidden-files-and-folders-in-windows-97fbc472-c603-9d90-91d0-1166d1d9f4b5
If you have the important data from Roaming, how fresh are the contents of the profile folders (the one ending with .default-release is usually the main one)? Does the bookmarkbackups folder have data from before the disaster?