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With a brand new profile / empty config installing plugins fails

edinburgh.steve
edinburgh.steve
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I recently had a problem with firefox becoming slow. Disabling all my extensions didn't seem to help, so I upgraded to the most recent version.

With a brand new profile, created via: 

    rm -rf ~/.mozilla/
    rm -rf ~/.cache/mozilla

Installation of any addons fails. I see they are downloaded to /tmp, and I see a progress bar appear in the addon manager - but they never advance. The only output is : 

  "Troubleshooter could not be installed because firefox unable to modify the needed file".

Running strace shows no obvious permissions problems, and clearly creating a new profile doesn't help - because that's the starting point. The standard advice is to disable old extensions, but similarly this doesn't work.

When restarting the browser the addons window is empty once again.

I recently had a problem with firefox becoming slow. Disabling all my extensions didn't seem to help, so I upgraded to the most recent version. With a brand new profile, created via: rm -rf ~/.mozilla/ rm -rf ~/.cache/mozilla Installation of any addons fails. I see they are downloaded to /tmp, and I see a progress bar appear in the addon manager - but they never advance. The only output is : "Troubleshooter could not be installed because firefox unable to modify the needed file". Running strace shows no obvious permissions problems, and clearly creating a new profile doesn't help - because that's the starting point. The standard advice is to disable old extensions, but similarly this doesn't work. When restarting the browser the addons window is empty once again.

All Replies (1)

edinburgh.steve
edinburgh.steve Question owner
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I "fixed" this by downloading version 28:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/28.0/linux-x86_64/en-GB/firefox-28.0.tar.bz2

Using that download I could install one add-on, which persisted across restarts. Once I'd done that I deleted the firefox-28, and went back to the latest release - at that point things started to work again.

To recap:

  • Empty profile.
  • Firefox 29.0
  • Installation of addons fails - though interestingly themes work just fine.

Once I installed 28.0 as a temporary measure I could install an addon, and then reinstalling 29.0 allowed a) that old addon to remain b) the addition of new addons.

Hope this helps somebody, though I'm struggling to find a plausible reason why this might be the case.