Firefox Community Forum

MacOS 15.5

I accidentally deleted my Firefox profile not knowing its criticality. When trying to open Firefox, I receive "Profile Missing. You're Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.".

1. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox to no success 2. In the Library/Application Support directory, there is no Firefox or Mozilla folder 3. In the Library/Caches directory, there is no Firefox or Mozilla folder 4. I have tried opening Firefox by pressing option + click, no change in behaviour

Hi, I'm running FF 149.0 (64-bit) on Windows 11. I've used profiles for a while now and on several occassions I've "lost profiles". Currently I have three profiles which I set up and edited the icon and colour associated with each. When I launch FF I see the Profile Manager and can select any of the three and I can create a new profile which shows here. However, once in any one of the FF profiles I don't see the others - by which I mean that when I go via the hamburger lines top right and click on the current profile, the 'other profiles' section is blank. I also cannot edit the profile from using the edit pencil top right (after clicking the hamburger lines and clicking on the current profile), it takes me to about:editprofile but the page is completely blank. Confusingly, if I go to about:profiles I see two profiles, neither of which shows up in the Profile Manager! I'm going round in circles trying to understand where to edit my exisitng profiles and make sense of the five profiles that don't all show up in the same place!

I found there're several folders at my "%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles", but only one of them works on Firefox. I also checked "about:profiles", but there's only one that is running. And I can't find where to load other profiles.

What happened is that - my PC crashed, after reboot, I found Firefox became a new one. I went to "%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles", and luckily found old data still exist safely. But I went to "about:profiles", there's only a new profile. And I don't know how to load the old profile.

So I tried copying files from other profile folder, and paste to replace (or overwrite) the profile that is working. IT WORKS. The new profile is replaced by the old. But it's not a regular way to do so. How to load a profile fold?

Hello,

I've been using the profile manager, and wanted to delete a profile that i have made. However, when i select the option to delete it, it only opens up a new tab in the profile called "about:deleteprofile', which displays an empty page and does nothing. Then, I would try to delete the profile manually, in the profiles folder, but if I opened firefox or restarted my computer, it would just come back. I have attatched the relevant images below.

Just this week I found it was impossible to get to firefox browsing until I chose an upsetting blob as my profile. Is there anyway to skip this step or at least to change that blob to something that makes a more pleasant experience?

Just this week firefox has been demanding that I choose a profile before I gain access. Can I skip this step? And how can I change the unpleasant blob that I must choose. I have got one answer which requests a screen shot but I can't find my question to attach it. (I can't find the old search questions--but I'm most elderly.) and need links or reminders. Anyway, I'll put the screen shot here.

I have switched OS, from Windows 10 to Linux Mint, and wanted to copy the Firefox profile to the new OS. I tried using this guide: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles

I copied the xxxxxxxx.default-release folder, then switched OS to Linux Mint. After copying the files from the backup folder into the new folder, Firefox launches, but is completely blank. See the attached image. None of the buttons work, nor does the address bar or new folders. I also tried logging in to my Firefox account before copying the files, but that didn't work either.

Default Firefox works fine.

I have a question about deleting a Firefox profile. When I access the profile screen via "about:profiles," I see two profiles: "default-release" and "Default User." The "default-release" profile is fine because it displays the message "This is the active profile and cannot be deleted." But is it okay to delete the "Default User" profile? Should I also delete the files in the root directory of the C: drive and the local directory? If I delete the "Default User", will it be deleted as well?

Hello, When I went to launch Firefox after starting up my PC this morning, I was greeted with: "Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible".

I went right to the Mozilla forums and found the help page [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-run-firefox-when-profile-missing...] . In this article it detailed how I should go into my AppData, then Mozilla, then Firefox, and look to see where my profile.ini file is. My profile.ini file was there, alongside the installs.ini and a few other folders. I attempted also to launch the profile manager using run and the "firefox.exe -P" command, but I got the same profile error as when I tried launching the app. The help page then recommended deleting the profile.ini file and then launching Firefox to hopefully remake the default profiles.ini file and enable me to launch Firefox, so I attempted that. When I tried relaunching Firefox, the profiles.ini file did not re-appear in my Firefox folder.

I then tried deleting the Firefox folder itself, and relaunching Firefox. This resulted in it being remade, but with just 2 folders left: Crash Reports and Pending Pings. Obviously that's not ideal, so I right clicked the Firefox folder and used the Windows "Previous versions" feature to restore the Firefox folder to a backup of how it was this morning. I then re-tried launching and I still got the same missing profiles error message. I also briefly attempted manually making a new profiles.ini file with notepad, and pointing it towards my Profile withing my Profiles folder, but that still resulted in the same missing profiles error.

This is basically where I am at now. I have confirmed that I do in fact see my actual profile in my "C:\Users\****\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles" folder, and as far as I can tell my profiles.ini file correctly points towards it. I did another reset of my Firefox folder to a backup of where I was at this morning before attempting anything. I can confirm my Windows account (Admin, and only account on the computer) has full read and write access to all Folders and files within the Mozilla folder, although I will mention some of the files in the Firefox folder were marked with the "Read-Only" attribute (not sure if that matters, but I tried unchecking those and still no luck)

As far as I can tell I have thoroughly exhausted all the easily accessible tips on the internet for solving this, so I am wondering what to try next?

TLDR: Error: Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible" Already Attempted (And failed): -deleting and prompting a remake of the profiles.ini folder -using firefox.exe -P to launch Profile manager -deleting Firefox folder to prompt a remake of that -multiple uninstalls and reinstalls of Firefox -manually remaking profiles.ini file after it didn't come back after deletion

Will link images of (1) profiles.ini file. (2) Profiles folder.

bold text Firefox has been my browser forever. When I tried to open it this morning I was invited to create a profile, so no profile, no Firefox..... I've never had to do this before and am reluctant because of the apparent threat of losing all my passwords and bookmarks. I'm 85 years of age so don't need this complication. Any help would be appreciated, complicated high tech answer will probably be beyond me. Brian.

Linux User So. I recently followed a Mozilla guide, previously posted, and something that I did, or changed, I now have a very annoying "profile" name in the title bar. Further to that, I now have an additional menu option called "Profiles", with --"profile --Add Profile

Manage Profiles

I have never had or seen these items, except when I've moved my profile from an old computer to a new computer, using the console of "firefox -P" command.

It is becoming very annoying as I only have one profile, and I don't want an more.

Question. How to I block the display of 'profile information' ? Thanks

Before the new profiles update in Firefox I was using the old version of creating profiles and I want to move that profile into the new profile method. Is that possible?

I’m running into a limitation with Firefox profiles involving the original Profile Manager (about:profiles) and the new Profiles menu in the toolbar.

I previously created multiple profiles using the original Profile Manager (about:profiles), for example profiles A, B, and C. These profiles still function normally and can be launched through about:profiles, but they do not appear in the new Profiles menu in the toolbar.

I also tried using the “Copy this profile” option available from the new Profiles menu. This made it clear that the feature does not work with profiles created via about:profiles. For example, when I open profile A, I expected that I could use “Copy this profile” to copy profile A into an existing profile like profile B (which was also created using about:profiles). However, this is not possible. Profiles A, B, and C remain isolated from the new Profiles menu and cannot be accessed, copied, or managed through it.

At the moment, profiles created with the original Profile Manager (about:profiles) can only be accessed through that manager and cannot be transferred into the new Profiles menu in the toolbar.

Is there an official fix or a workaround that achieves the same result—specifically, transferring or integrating all existing profiles created with the original Profile Manager (about:profiles) into the new Profiles menu accessible from the Firefox toolbar?

I want to restore a previous profile which I can see on File Explorer, but no previous profiles appear on the About Profiles page. How can I access this previous profile?

I keep finding names in my account list with the name hakeem attached. I don't know who this hakeem is or how this name and the associated links became attached to my account. I have 3 firewalls and several antivirus/spam/etc blockers activated. Help.

Unimportant and mildly disruptive issue: I've been using the about:profiles method to maintain separate profiles. I am aware that this is distinct from the new way to manage profiles (about:profilemanager; https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1543697 ).

I normally use my default profile (let's call it profile A) to open other profiles (of which there are 6 + a Nightly profile).

However, recently I've noticed that if I open another profile (B) from profile A: Refreshing profile A's about:profiles makes it inactive, with the "Another copy of Firefox has made changes to profiles" error. Now, B's about:profiles correctly displays the different profiles, and I can launch more profiles from here. But A is still shown as the default profile. I've tried this with a few other profiles (C, D), but even with those open, B still seems to have the functional about:profiles page.

Is there any way to reset this, i.e. to make A's about:profiles functional even when profile B is launched?

Edit: I think this is because profile B has the new profile manager enabled, and under this, B is the original profile. I tried setting browser.profiles.enabled to false in the about:config settings but this doesn't seem to help. Oh well!