When Firefox does not open

Posted on in misc

Today, after applying latest update of macOS Monterey, I restarted my laptop.

But Firefox won’t start 😢

No error, no nothing, no window either.

At first, I uninstalled existing version, downloaded a fresh one from internet (using Vivaldi). I assumed that maybe my OS update broke something, and reinstalling might help.

It didn’t.

Then, I started Firefox from the terminal hoping to see error, if any 1.

Didn’t help.

Next, I decided to remove the cache. 2

Assuming that one of the page was taking too long to load. I wanted to really remove “history” of all the windows and all the tabs across all those windows. I didn’t know how. So I started by clearing cache.

Normally I would do this from inside Firefox. But today I didn’t have that option. Hence, tried directly removing it from the terminal 2

Didn’t help.

Final option: Remove the profile folder itself. 3

Worked! 🎉

😌

  1. cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS followed by /firefox ↩︎

  2. cd ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles and then rm -rf <profile_folders> ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. cd ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox && rm -rf * ↩︎