After installing Nightly, Firefox cannot be installed
The installation of Nightly caused major problems in Firefox. (Windows 10 PC) I want BOTH Nightly and Firefox on my computer; however my Firefox profile became corrupted in the process. Things like: the Bookmarks not appearing despite all the settings for them being correct; Firefox crashing when importing bookmarks. Fed up, I decided I wanted a completely new installation of Firefox. I could use my sync to my Firefox account to get most of what I needed back easily... I thought. I don't want to detail every step, they are too many. The important part, I think, is this. Installing Firefox, I need for it to create a new profile. Beause the old one had NUMEROUS corruptions, I got rid of it, thinking that Firefox can create a new profile when installing the software from scratch. But guess what? It will not do that. THE PROBLEM is that Nightly and Firefox share the same Roaming/Profiles folder, which means that the .ini files contain references to BOTH profiles in a single file. Profiles.ini contains both. Installs.ini contains references to both. If I delete - or try to alter the contents of - either .ini file, then Nightly loses its profile as well. I have restored those two files to where Nightly now starts up normally, thank god. But there is NOTHING I can do so far to get the new installation of Firefox to start up without trying to find the now missing profile which was corrputed to the point that it was more trouble than it was worth. It used to be possible to install Firefox and make whatever fixes were necessary before starting up the browser. Now it is not; it starts up automatically, or not at all. WHY is the setup designed this way? Really large error on the part of Mozilla developers to put the profiles info and installs info into the same file, so that upon uninstalling Firefox, you must either find the old corrupt profile again, or start from scratch with BOTH Nightly and Firefox. We waste SO MANY HOURS trying to work around the careless / thoughtless things that developers do! Please can someone help me? For now I have Nightly, but it looks like I will never have Firefox again after using it and its ancestors for 25 years. Thanks in advance!
தீர்வு தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்டது
Nightly (95) should use its own profile and release (93) should also use its own profile unless you mangled something and forced release to use the Nightly profile.
You can edit profiles.ini and only leave the reference to the Nightly profile. You can delete/rename installs.ini as this file is used as a backup to be able to rebuild profiles.ini in case it was rewritten by an older Firefox version. That should release force to create a new profile or at least show the Profile Manager window where you can create a new profile.
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Please forward this issue to a knowledgable developer if you know of one. Thanks! :)
Because of compatibility issues, Make sure you have a separate profile for each version because some things, like add-ons and some settings, are not compatible.
You can use sync to share passwords, bookmarks, and history. Anything else may not be compatible between different browser versions or computer systems.
This shows the shortcuts I use to start each Firefox version I have; (Note the quotes) "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox_54\firefox.exe" -p Firefox_54
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox_Current\firefox.exe" -p default-release
The -p switch tells the browser what profile to use.
Thanks. All of that is what I was planning to do. Firefox and Nightly are both installed in the Program Files directory, not the (x86) directory. They have separate shortcuts so there is no problem with one trying to open the other. The current stage of my difficulty is that Firefox new installation cannot and will not create a new profile, and therefore will not start up at all. Again, I believe it is the two files I mentioned above, the .ini files, that the new installation reads and causes it to look for the no-longer-existing profile it is expecting to find. Why it cannot create a new profile just for Firefox so that I can then start it up and do all the importing via sync, as I said before, I do not know.
I do not know how to rewrite the existing .ini files to stop it from seeking the missing Firefox profile that I do not want any more because of corruption. If you can help with this please let me know. Please note, I am not seeking such things as "why Firefox and Nightly use separate profiles". I am seeking a means to install Firefox alongside Nightly on the same computer.
தீர்வு தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்டது
Nightly (95) should use its own profile and release (93) should also use its own profile unless you mangled something and forced release to use the Nightly profile.
You can edit profiles.ini and only leave the reference to the Nightly profile. You can delete/rename installs.ini as this file is used as a backup to be able to rebuild profiles.ini in case it was rewritten by an older Firefox version. That should release force to create a new profile or at least show the Profile Manager window where you can create a new profile.
Thank you cor-el Below (between the lines I marked here with ---) is the content in the profiles.ini file. Can you tell me what to delete and what to leave in?
[Install308046B0AF4A39CB] Default=Profiles/g867rzof.default-release Locked=1
[Profile2] Name=default-nightly IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/nxnsjxen.default-nightly-1635345435636
[Profile1] Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/ssbkqnpf.default Default=1
[Profile0] Name=default-release IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/g867rzof.default-release
[Install6F193CCC56814779] Default=Profiles/nxnsjxen.default-nightly-1635345435636 Locked=1
[General] StartWithLastProfile=1 Version=2 ---
Reinstalling Firefox AFTER changing the name of the installs.ini file to installs.iniOLD, it still shows the message "Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible." I have not altered the profiles.ini file because it is needed by Nightly and I don't know how to alter it. But renaming installs.ini did not help; not yet....
bwp123 மூலமாக திருத்தப்பட்டது
If you start Firefox with the -p switch, it should open the Profile Manager and you should be able to create a new profile.
I think you should forget (for now) the old profile and have each version create a new profile. After, we can Copy parts of the original profile to the new ones. Note: you should give each profile a name to make it easier to identify.
FredMcD said
This shows the shortcuts I use to start each Firefox version I have; (Note the quotes) "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox_54\firefox.exe" -p Firefox_54 "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox_Current\firefox.exe" -p default-release
The Nightly profile is located at the top as [Profile2] The [Profile1] with Path=Profiles/ssbkqnpf.default is the default profile that Firefox will use if you do not specify a profile, so it looks that that profile is missing and you can check the path. You can possibly remove the 'Default=1' line on this profile to see if that makes Firefox show the profile manager.
Is the g867rzof.default-release profile still present as that might be a more recent profile ?
Thank you both for all the answers given. I followed the previous step by step solution more to the letter this time, and found particularly helpful was the section with the heading "Start the Profile Manager when Firefox is closed." That way the machine was able to overwrite the right files in the right order. I now have both browsers installed and working. Special thanks to Corel, a name I can appreciate as an old Netscape user myself.