Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.
Categories
(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: jeff, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Steps to reproduce:
Firefox was working fine on Xubuntu 22.04. The OS upgrade completely failed and I am now rebuilding a new Xubuntu 24.04.1 system. I uninstalled the snap package and installed the latest version of Firefox from the mozillateam ppa (131.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.24.04.1~mt1). Any attempt to start /usr/bin/firefox results in the pop-up message:
"Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible."
This is not true. The same profiles exist in ~/.mozilla/firefox and even attempting to specify a specific profile with -P fails. This problem seems commonly reported on other versions of Linux but not Ubuntu. I tried removing the entire ~/.mozilla directory but that did nothing. I tried starting in safe mode, but same results. However, there are also other start-up messages:
17-> /usr/bin/firefox
[Parent 29355, Main Thread] WARNING: Failed to parse /u/jeff/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini: Permission denied: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox-E8vObn/firefox-131.0.2+build1/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:187
(firefox:29355): Gtk-WARNING **: 09:37:42.425: Failed to parse /u/jeff/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini: Permission denied
[Parent 29355, Main Thread] WARNING: Theme parsing error: gtk.css:1:0: Failed to import: Error opening file /u/jeff/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css: Permission denied: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox-E8vObn/firefox-131.0.2+build1/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:187
(firefox:29355): Gtk-WARNING **: 09:37:42.426: Theme parsing error: gtk.css:1:0: Failed to import: Error opening file /u/jeff/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css: Permission denied
[Parent 29355, Unnamed thread 74eea8386ca0] WARNING: Failed to get cache content /u/jeff/.cache/gtk-3.0/compose/8bedc2de.cache: Failed to open file “/u/jeff/.cache/gtk-3.0/compose/8bedc2de.cache”: Permission denied: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox-E8vObn/firefox-131.0.2+build1/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:187
(firefox:29355): Gtk-WARNING **: 09:37:42.732: Failed to get cache content /u/jeff/.cache/gtk-3.0/compose/8bedc2de.cache: Failed to open file “/u/jeff/.cache/gtk-3.0/compose/8bedc2de.cache”: Permission denied
[Parent 29355, Unnamed thread 74eea8386ca0] WARNING: Failed to open file “/u/jeff/.XCompose”: Permission denied: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox-E8vObn/firefox-131.0.2+build1/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:187
(firefox:29355): Gtk-WARNING **: 09:37:42.732: Failed to open file “/u/jeff/.XCompose”: Permission denied
None of this makes sense as all these files exist and are readable.
Actual results:
Firefox simply will not start.
Expected results:
It should start and see my existing profiles.
Suggestions?
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Comment 1•1 year ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Gtk' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.
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Reporter | |
Comment 2•1 year ago
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I wanted to add that my HOME directory is really located at /u/jeff (where it has been for 40 years!) and not under /home. I had no problem with Firefox running this way on Xubuntu 22.04. I know that the snap package that Canonical developed would not work if home directories were not located under /home which is why I have always rejected using their snap-based tools. There seems to be something wrong with the software under 24.04.1, but the question is what? I rely heavily on Firefox so I'd like to get this resolved ASAP.
Regards.
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Reporter | |
Comment 3•1 year ago
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Some additional info:
I was successfully using a tarball installation of Firefox dating back to version 101, located in /usr/local/lib, on previous versions of the OS, including a laptop running Xubuntu 24.04.1. This version of Firefox automatically updates and is currently at 131.0.3. I copied the the directory over to the new machine, removed the deb-packaged installation from mozillateam, and Firefox started up immediately and works fine. There seems to be some GTK problem with the new deb packaging that doesn't exist with the earlier build. Let me know if I can provide any additional useful information.
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Comment 4•10 months ago
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Your report shows permissions errors on /u/jeff content, are you sure everything is properly owned there? You may be missing access to /u/jeff/.cache/mozilla/... there's another bug around where it says that lack of permissions on $XDG_CACHE_DIR results in incorrect error report of missing profile, confere bug 1939539
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Comment 5•10 months ago
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You may also want to switch deb packages: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-from-mozilla-builds
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Comment 6•10 months ago
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I "solved" this problem for myself quite a while ago. I could never get any of the packaged versions of Firefox to work under Ubuntu 24.04 for whatever reasons. This included the deb version on mozilla.org. What I ended up doing was bringing over the self-installed version of Firefox from Ubuntu 22.04 which I had installed under /usr/local/lib/firefox and had been using for many years and OS upgrades. I remember that I used to download tarballs of Firefox and install them on the machine. But then Firefox started updating automatically and I no longer had to download and install new versions. This older version of Firefox just worked and it continues to self-update to all the newer releases. I never saw any problems with, or changed any file or directory permissions, etc.
As this was some useless info as far as this bug was concerned, I didn't report back. I never did come to understand why the newer versions of Firefox failed to properly install/run under 24.04. What I do discover is that pretty much everything in the software world these days is becoming too "smart" for its own good, and this makes tracking down problems more and more difficult. I'm particularly upset with the snap/flatpack/etc. packaging which have introduced so many new difficulties.
Anyway, thanks for the follow-up. If I'm the only person who experienced this problem, you are welcome to close the report.
Regards,
Jeffery Small
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Comment 7•10 months ago
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How did you solved? What about the permissions issue I asked earlier and if it's related to cache dir ? Knowing that would be useful to assert the impact
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Reporter | |
Comment 8•10 months ago
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I never "solved" the permission issues! As I said originally, my investigation of those initial error messages made no sense as all the reported files/directories existed, were owned by me, and were readable. I certainly would have fixed ownership or mode issues if any were obvious. Since my old Firefox installation worked once installed, I stopped looking, just assuming that the newer binaries, as packaged, were trying to do something else altogether. I've not had any similar problems with Firefox as it has (annoyingly) continued to update almost every one or two weeks.
My only current serious problem with Firefox is that after every major update, the new binary has trouble reestablishing contact with my Apache2 web server. It usually takes 15+ minutes to resolve, but one that happens it seems to work fine until the next update. :-/ Someday I may look into reporting this as a separate bug.
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Comment 9•10 months ago
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(In reply to Jeffery Small from comment #8)
I never "solved" the permission issues! As I said originally, my investigation of those initial error messages made no sense as all the reported files/directories existed, were owned by me, and were readable. I certainly would have fixed ownership or mode issues if any were obvious. Since my old Firefox installation worked once installed, I stopped looking, just assuming that the newer binaries, as packaged, were trying to do something else altogether. I've not had any similar problems with Firefox as it has (annoyingly) continued to update almost every one or two weeks.
My only current serious problem with Firefox is that after every major update, the new binary has trouble reestablishing contact with my Apache2 web server. It usually takes 15+ minutes to resolve, but one that happens it seems to work fine until the next update. :-/ Someday I may look into reporting this as a separate bug.
There should be no reason the packaged deb from mozilla do not work. But unless you are willing to test and report the failures you haven we're blocked here.
Those errors related to .cache really looks like bug 1939539 but unless we can confirm I cannot dupe it. If it's all working for you right now, maybe we should RESOLVED:WORKSFORME. I'm still curious of the reason why you have issues with the deb package, maybe there's something broken in your system? We've seem weird behavior in the past of upgrades around 2204 -> 2404.
Please file new bugs if you have any (and neeedinfo me so it does not end up in a blackhole?), I'm closing this one for now.
Description
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