Firefox will not open after fresh install in OSX Lion. "Firefox profile missing."
After recently upgrading OS X Snow leopard to OS X 10.7 Lion I downloaded and ran the Firefox installer package, only to find that Firefox could not open. The error message says "Profile missing – Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible" I checked Firefox forums and found a script that when run in Terminal allows access to the (upper) Library folder; but this still does not solve the issue. Obviously, with Lion Apple has deliberately placed a stumbling block in the way of would-be Firefox users.
Chosen solution
Profile in use
Browser will not start up
Check and tell if its working.
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Chosen Solution
Profile in use
Browser will not start up
Check and tell if its working.
Thank you. I solved the dilemma, which was one of my own making although I take no blame for it. You see, a while back I grew tired of going through the semantics of manually deleting Caches and Cookies and simply locked those folders (in Users/my name/Library) so that nothing could be added or removed from them without login credentials. . . . There's where the fly got into the ointment. The Caches folder must be unlocked in order to run Firefox because it uses Caches to store files. Folder unlocked – problem solved. It seems that OS X Lion has more warts than its predecessors (initially, at least), in that where Apple once gave the user full egress to all venues, it has developed a hard-nosed, up-in-your-face micro-managerial stance with Lion – such as making the System/Library invisible. This, of course, under the tacit label of "offering the user greater security" . . . against himself. If you fully embrace that logic I've got some s. Florida realty I can dump I mean sell you on the cheap, lol. I appreciate your kind help.
Thanks. mike4444
Glad to hear it
Modified by Hasan
Although I am grateful to mha007 for her input, neither of the two potential solutions she provided had anything to do with my issue. As stated, I had long ago locked the Library/Caches folder back when I was running Leopard and simply never bothered to unlock it. After Safari (which I'd used exclusively until lately, when Apple made it ridiculously user-UNfriendly) was no longer tasked to use the Library/Caches and Cookies folders for temp storage, since in the most recent Safari update (preparing users for the upgrade to Lion) Apple had inveigled to store those files in a new, undisclosed location, was when Safari went south for me; that is to say, became too tricky to use because some websites' URL- redirects were reloaded AFTER quitting Safari. Accordingly, a "cold start" of Safari from Desktop reloaded the last web page from the previous browsing session. . . and there was nothing I could do about it. B4, quitting Safari meant that all stored temp files from previous browsing sessions were dumped. Not anymore. This is pro-advertising, corporate chicanery ala Unca Billy – and part of the reason why I keep saying that Apple is the new Microsoft. It's still ALL ABOUT THE MONEY. But for those of you running the new OS X Lion on Apple Intel hardware, who want to install Firefox, you shouldn't have trouble as long as you follow the directions and have no locked folders in Users/(your name [Home Folder]) /Library. mike4444
Modified by mike4444
Dude i am a He :P
Mac OS X Lion will not create a ~/Library/Caches folder on a clean install or when migrating applications and users from another volume. This causes FF to fail loading and show the "Profile missing" error message. Creating the ~/Library/Caches folder using sudo (due to some permission issues) and fixing it's ownership allowed Firefox to start.