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OS X SERVER "Profile Missing Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible."

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by jmhstech

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We have an OS X 10.6.8 SL server managing our iMacs. Since the update of the workstations to at least 10.6.8 and Firefox 34.0.5, we get the error: [Profile Missing Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.] upon launch of Firefox. It appears to be an issue that the profile is stored on the server rather than on the local hard drive. There is no way whatsoever to access, configure, start, or any other way manage Firefox at this point. Need a solution to this problem as we have hundreds of users that are unable to use Firefox now.

We have an OS X 10.6.8 SL server managing our iMacs. Since the update of the workstations to at least 10.6.8 and Firefox 34.0.5, we get the error: [Profile Missing Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.] upon launch of Firefox. It appears to be an issue that the profile is stored on the server rather than on the local hard drive. There is no way whatsoever to access, configure, start, or any other way manage Firefox at this point. Need a solution to this problem as we have hundreds of users that are unable to use Firefox now.

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See:

This is usually caused by a problem with the profiles.ini file and the profile marked as Default=1 in this file is no longer present on the hard drive.

  • Windows: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
    C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\
  • Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/
  • Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/

In Mac OS X v10.7 and later, the ~/Library folder is a hidden folder.


You can use one of these to make Firefox create/use a new default profile:

  • Delete the profiles.ini file to force Firefox to create a new default profile
  • Use the Profile Manager to create a new profile
  • Use "Choose Folder" when you create a new profile to select the location of a lost profile and recover this profile
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Thanks for you response, however, as I mentioned in my post, Firefox is impossible to start. The profile manager will not launch, as it starts through Firefox. It is not possible to change the location of the profile.ini file- and even if it's not present, Firefox will not create a new one and/or access it. Being server managed, we are unable to store the file locally.