Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Refresh brings back old add-ons

  • 2 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by drizzler

drizzler
drizzler
more options

After doing a Firefox Refresh, everything seems to go smoothly. All my add-ons are removed, preferences reset, etc. However, when I quit and restart Firefox, suddenly all my old add-ons and settings are back as if I never did the refresh. What is causing this, and how can I get the refresh to stick?

This is Firefox 41 on a Mac.

After doing a Firefox Refresh, everything seems to go smoothly. All my add-ons are removed, preferences reset, etc. However, when I quit and restart Firefox, suddenly all my old add-ons and settings are back as if I never did the refresh. What is causing this, and how can I get the refresh to stick? This is Firefox 41 on a Mac.

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

This could be a problem with the profiles.ini file where the new profile didn't get registered. When you close and restart Firefox then the location of the old profile is read from the profiles.ini file.

See:

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

  • Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/
  • Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/
  • Windows: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
    *C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\
drizzler
drizzler Question owner
more options

profiles.ini looks like this:

[General] StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0] Name=testing IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/yc78tlbp.testing

[Profile1] Name=default-1443010542218 IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/0ydp7gzl.default-1443010542218 Default=1

Those are my 2 profiles. "Default" is the one I use most of the time and contains all my add-ons, "testing" is basically a clean profile for testing and has no add-ons.

The "default" profile gets a new number each time I do a refresh, and the old one gets moved to the "Old Firefox Data" folder on my desktop. profiles.ini gets updated each time with the new numbered "default" profile.

So each time I do a refresh the profiles folder contains the same 2 profiles, but the "default" one should not include any add-ons, right? But as soon as I restart Firefox, the add-ons return. I can't figure out why this is happening.