Firefox Forgets ALL Settings!

[bochen360]

Okay, sorry to rant, but has anyone ELSE experienced this issue?

I use Firefox 3.0.3 and the very month or so mysteriously and for NO APPARENT reason at all the TOOLS->OPTIONS settings in Firefox browser will RESET itself to a blank default factory install state/condition....

This REALLY makes me mad to no end because I SPENT time to set everything exactly the way I want it! (for example I HATE autoupdate and all that )

This is worse since somehow it RESETS the settings of all of my plugins that I have. So my ADBLOCKER PLUS loses all its subscriptions and I have to go back and manually ad them in again, my custom advertisement blocking list is LOST, my NOSCRIPT goes haywire and forgets what all its supposed to block and blocks those that I had previously whitelisted before the RESET of Firefox, my BLOCKSITE loses the sites it was told to block and on and on...

Even last night everything was working great. I have ZERO problems with my PC (Windows XP SP2 autoupdates turned off as well, no virus, no thing...) I shutdown NORMALLY (didn't cut the power or whatever, etc...) This morning boots up and firefox takes longer than usual to load, then I find out it takes me to that Mozilla page (forgot the fact I set my homepage to about:blank, etc) and then I find out what really happened and my browser totally screwed up...

I'm beginning to think this is a conspiracy on the side of Mozilla to return its browser back to default condition as an underhanded way to forcible force us to UPDATE to its newer version! AFTER ALL it lets me TURN OFF automatic update but if the browser "ACCIDENTALLY" "FORGETS" its settings and go haywire like a broken terminator robot and reverts back to factory install conditions all it takes is a few moments of internet connection and whoops Firefox just updated itself again!!!!!! I hope Mozilla is not THIS cynical but after this happening a few times I am having SERIOUS doubts...

Has this happened to anyone else on here? Anyone know or confirm this is conspiracy to get us to force us to autoupdate even if we have it turned OFF and NEVER want to update??

 

[MrChad]

My first guess is that your profile has been corrupted. You can try some of the ideas mentioned in this article, and, failing that, create a new profile.

As a side note, I hope you are diligent about applying security updates manually if you choose to disable auto-update features.

 

[Sam25]

Perhaps this might be of some help:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-...ferences+are+not+saved

 

[bochen360]

Thanks all I will look into it and report back if I have more issues. Anyone know of a third party tool to migrate/backup entire profile of firefox?

 

[Sam25]

Here are some backup utilities for backing-up Firefox profile:

http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

http://customsoftwareconsult.c...ensions/febe/febe.html

 

[CP5670]

This is a very annoying and long standing problem with Firefox that has never been resolved. I don't know what causes it, but I've gotten it several times over the years. The frequency seems to have decreased with FF 3.0 but I still got it once last month. There are also some variants of the same issue, where only certain profile settings get reset or the browser starts to behave oddly in some way (last time, I got a weird issue where all websites were treated as text forms and a blinking cursor showed up anywhere I clicked).

The best way to avoid this is to make a zipped backup of the entire Firefox profile directory in Documents and Settings, and dump the backup over the existing files whenever the problem comes up. All of these problems are caused by FF somehow corrupting its own profile. That Mozbackup addon may work, but I don't know if it backs up absolutely everything.