Public bug reported:
On a freshly installed Ubuntu 13.04 64bit on a brand new computer, I had
Firefox 20 running fine.
Then I updated it via sudo apt-get install firefox, which updated it to 24.
After that, any attempt to run Firefox would fail with the error popup (more or
less) "Your profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible".
If run from a command line, it would show this error: "Error reading profile
directory: access denied", or something like that.
After a whole day of googling and forum posting and useless attempt to
sort it out, I found out that the issue was that ~/.cache/mozilla had
"root" as the owner and group. Deleting that folder fixed the issue (a
new one was created which now correctly belongs to my user).
Needless to say, I didn't do anything that would legitimate the wrong
owner of the ~/.cache/mozilla folder. I never touched it, so if it got
the wrong owner there's a bug somewhere.
Please do not underestimate the importance of this bug, which renders firefox
unusable, and whose workaround, though extremely easy, is very hard to figure
out.
Also, I bet most user who face this will almost surely delete their profile (as
I did) in a useless attempt to fix it, because that's the most common answer to
profile loading problems.
** Affects: firefox (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1239406
Title:
cache folder belongs to root, causing firefox to fail to run
Status in “firefox” package in Ubuntu:
New
Bug description:
On a freshly installed Ubuntu 13.04 64bit on a brand new computer, I had
Firefox 20 running fine.
Then I updated it via sudo apt-get install firefox, which updated it to 24.
After that, any attempt to run Firefox would fail with the error popup (more
or less) "Your profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible".
If run from a command line, it would show this error: "Error reading profile
directory: access denied", or something like that.
After a whole day of googling and forum posting and useless attempt to
sort it out, I found out that the issue was that ~/.cache/mozilla had
"root" as the owner and group. Deleting that folder fixed the issue (a
new one was created which now correctly belongs to my user).
Needless to say, I didn't do anything that would legitimate the wrong
owner of the ~/.cache/mozilla folder. I never touched it, so if it got
the wrong owner there's a bug somewhere.
Please do not underestimate the importance of this bug, which renders firefox
unusable, and whose workaround, though extremely easy, is very hard to figure
out.
Also, I bet most user who face this will almost surely delete their profile
(as I did) in a useless attempt to fix it, because that's the most common
answer to profile loading problems.
To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1239406/+subscriptions
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