Cormac Moylan

Hi, my name is Cormac and this is my blog. On the web circa July 2006.

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How to do a factory restore to Firefox’s default settings

October 15th, 2007 by Cormac Moylan · 3 Comments

For the past few weeks Firefox has been crawling on my Macbook. It became very unresponsive and it stopped loading web pages. I thought it may be something to do with some minor network issues in work but it the issues remained after our network was sorted out.

I disabled all my extensions and cleared all my privacy settings but the problem remained.

In the end I conducted a factory restore of Firefox’s default settings and it promptly resolved the issue.

For Mac, open up Terminal and type in: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -safe-mode at the prompt. Firefox will restart and will display a pop-up asking you which settings you wish to restore. Select the necessary ones and click OK.

For Windows, click on Start -> Run and type in:
firefox -safe-mode  followed by Enter.

On Linux , load up Terminal and type in:
/path/to/firefox/firefox -safe-mode

And that’s that. FF should now fully relaunch using its original settings.

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Tags: Browsers · Firefox

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Dave Jeffery // Oct 15, 2007 at 3:45 pm

    Did you try creating a new profile. I have two profiles a web development profile and a web browsing profile. I try to plugins out of the web browsing profile. More about creating firefox profiles here: http://tearesolutions.com/2007/01/creating_firefox_profiles_on_mac_os_x.html

  • 2 Cormac Moylan // Oct 15, 2007 at 4:04 pm

    Is the reason for the multiple profiles just to prevent Firefox from unnessecarily loading up extensions when all you want to do is browse?

    I only really use Firefox for web dev purposes anyway (Pearl Saver Basic, Web Dev Toolbar, Colorzilla, FireFTP, Firebug)

  • 3 Dave Jeffery // Oct 15, 2007 at 6:56 pm

    Yeah, that’s what I use them for. You also get separate bookmarks, history, toolbar layout, sessions etc…

    I find that Firefox is a bit prone to crashing if it’s loaded with extensions, also the toolbar takes up half the screen when I’ve got the web dev profile loaded, so a separate bare-bones profile makes sense for me.

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