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My Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible and I could not fix that even following the instructions

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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When trying to open Firefox I get a message: Profile Missing. Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible. In the Application Support when I click in the Firefox logo it's open the same window: "Your Firefox profile cannot... and I can't go ahead. I do not have anything else of Firefox in this folder. Finder did not showed nothing either. I followed the instructions for "Missing Profile" but I could not go ahead because all the Firefox folders are missing. I access my e-mails opening hotmail through google.

When trying to open Firefox I get a message: Profile Missing. Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible. In the Application Support when I click in the Firefox logo it's open the same window: "Your Firefox profile cannot... and I can't go ahead. I do not have anything else of Firefox in this folder. Finder did not showed nothing either. I followed the instructions for "Missing Profile" but I could not go ahead because all the Firefox folders are missing. I access my e-mails opening hotmail through google.

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You need to locate the profiles.ini file or use the Profile Manager to create a new profile.

See:


This can be caused by a problem with the profiles.ini file and the profile marked as Default=1 in this file is no longer present on the hard drive.

You can use one of these to make Firefox create a new default profile or reuse an existing profile:

  • Delete the profiles.ini file to force Firefox to create a new default profile
  • Use the Profile Manager to create a new profile
    If you still have an existing profile then click "Choose Folder" in the PM and select the location of a lost profile and recover this profile.

You should find the profiles.ini file in this hidden location:

  • Windows: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
    C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\
  • Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/

If clearing the profiles.ini file isn't working then also check the location of the cache files.

  • Windows: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
  • Mac: /Users/<user>/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/<profile>/Cache