Comments on: Restore the Default Settings in Firefox Without Uninstalling It

By: Kurt

Kurt — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:08:28 +0000

Thanks, but this tip didn’t work for my problem. Using system restore has removed the ability to “restore defaults” under Firefox search engines–the option is greyed out. This is a “bug” that Mozilla acknowledges in their Mozillazine help forums, although they don’t see it as a bug. I do. (What is a bug if not incompatibility with features of the OS?) After my last system restore, it removed Google as my default search plugin. Running in safe mode didn’t fix the problem. (Obviously, reinstalling Firefox, including earlier versions of the same, didn’t fix the problem either.)

By: Asian Angel

Asian Angel — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:41:57 +0000

@Richard Iurilli – Here is a list of the extensions that have buttons showing (all extensions listed from the pre-reset screenshot and by area).

Upper Left Corner: Delicious Bookmarks and WOT

Upper Right Corner: The 1st and 3rd buttons to the right of the address bar are from the Toolbar Buttons Extension, the 2nd button is from the Cache Viewer Extension, followed by Forecast Fox

Lower Left Corner: Measure It

Lower Right Corner: Ad-Block Plus, Delicious Bookmarks (displaying again in the status bar), Dictionary Switcher, Firebug, Orange Dictionary (Thai-English), and Stylish

By: Paul Eck

Paul Eck — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:51:02 +0000

An easier, albeit dirtier, option is to simply delete your profile folder. Firefox will automagically build a new one for you. It is normally located in ~/.mozilla/firefox under Linux (specifically Ubuntu). Windows is a bit trickier. In XP you will find it in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla/Firefox or C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local\Application Data\Mozilla/Firefox. In Vista it is in a similar folder except it’s C:\Users\username\Local\Application Data\Mozilla/Firefox or C:\Users\username\Application Data\Mozilla/Firefox . The Windows locations are from what I remember and are not verified. The folder you want to delete will probably be named xxxxxx.default where xxxxxx is a bunch of seemingly random letters and numbers.

By: Richard Iurilli

Richard Iurilli — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:49:25 +0000

Nice tip.

Do you have a loist of all the extensions installed before the reset? I’m curious as to what a few of those buttons are.

By: Alex Leonard

Alex Leonard — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:34:13 +0000

I’m quite fond of running “firefox.exe -ProfileManager”. Within the Profile Manager I have a completely blank profile which I can start up to test things etc, and most recently I migrated to a brand new profile as the old one was feeling incredibly sluggish.

I think my old profile has been on the go for about 4 years and I figured that it was most likely carrying a lot of old baggage with it.

So in setting up the new profile I used Xmarks to carry all my bookmarks and passwords across. Then reinstalled the necessary plugins. My places.sqlite went from 235mb to 2.7mb or something, and the overall profile folder has gone from 376mb to 43.5mb.

The only thing lost in the process was my history, but I’m quite happy to start afresh with that.