Firefox refuses to load, cannot find profile

[jessesmith]

Platform: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (64-bit)
Firefox version: 21

What happens:
After upgrading to Firefox 21 any attempt to launch the Firefox application displays an error saying the user's profile cannot be found or is invalid. (The exact error message is "Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.") The Firefox browser then closes. Trying to launch the profile manager or launch Firefox with an alternative profile or in safe mode all produce the same error, followed by Firefox closing.

What is expected:
Firefox should open, or at least display the profile manager to allow users to fix the problem.

Work around:
I tried deleting my profile and, indeed, the entire ~/.mozilla directory. Made sure Firefox was not running. Removed/purged Firefox and re-installed. None of these steps corrected the problem. The only work around I've found which allows Firefox to run is removing Firefox 21 and installer an older version. Firefox 11.0, for example, is in the repositories. Warning, upgrading to Firefox 21 after successfully installing and running an older version causes the problem to occur again.

[Travis Bean (tlbean)]

I have confirmed this problem on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Firefox version 22.0).

[Travis Bean (tlbean)]

I found a workaround for this problem:

sudo aa-update-browser -u plugins-common /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox
sudo service apparmor reload

[Travis Bean (tlbean)]

When I use aa-update-browser -u plugins-common to fix the problem with Firefox, it creates another problem when using aa-enforce:

ubuntu-admin@OR-DC1-UB:/etc/apparmor.d$ sudo aa-enforce /etc/apparmor.d/*
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/bin.ping to enforce mode.
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/lightdm-guest-session to enforce mode.
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/sbin.dhclient to enforce mode.
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/sbin.klogd to enforce mode.
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/sbin.syslogd to enforce mode.
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/sbin.syslog-ng to enforce mode.
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.chromium-browser to enforce mode.
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince to enforce mode.
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox to enforce mode.
Warning from stdin (line 1): /sbin/apparmor_parser: cannot use or update cache, disable, or force-complain via stdin
Multiple definitions for hat sanitized_helper in profile (null) exist,bailing out.

Out of all the browser abstractions (java kde mailto multimedia plugins-common productivity text-editors ubuntu-integration ubuntu-integration-xul user-files), plugins-common is the only one that generates this error.

[Travis Bean (tlbean)]

The problem I had with Firefox not loading in "enforce mode" is that my user's home path is set to /ubuntu-admin rather than /home/ubuntu-admin. I fixed this problem as follows:

sed -i "s|@{HOME}=@{HOMEDIRS}/\*/ /root/|@{HOME}=@{HOMEDIRS}/\*/ /root/ /\*/|" /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home

[Teo (teo1978)]

I can't believe it.
On a fresh install of Ubuntu 13.04 I had firefox running fine.
I realized it's not the latest version, so before I tried to figure out the chaos of outdated instructions and dead repository links in the official ubuntu docs in order to get the latest version of Firefox, I thought I would simply try "sudo apt-get install firefox" first.
After that, I systematically get the error described here.

How can this be unsolved since may??

[Teo (teo1978)]

By the way, it is Firefox 24 now (and Ubuntu 13.04)

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner.

Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) reached end-of-life on April 28, 2017.
Ubuntu 13.04 (raring) reached end-of-life on January 27, 2014.

Presumably your issue was resolved some time ago and this bug report can now be closed? I'm changing the status to "Incomplete" to allow this report to expire in the absence of any further comments.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]