19.5   Starting a reluctant firefox

The following comes from Ticket 20060123114442.

Question:
From John Shipman:

I had a firefox running on pi.nmt.edu, and it died uncleanly.

Now, when I try to run firefox from pi, I get this popup:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

Normally if I have more than one firefox running, I get the Choose User Profile popup so I can create a new profile to coexist with the other firefox processes.

On pi, I did a ps -Al, but it didn't show a firefox process.

I was able to fix this once before by removing my ENTIRE .mozilla directory and all subdirectories. This is a bit drastic, because I had to re-enter all my preferences.

Is there some way to defeat this interlock, short of removing the whole .mozilla directory?

Answer:
The first effort at cure would be to delete the .parentlock file found under  /.mozilla/firefox/profilename/ (where profilename is a jumble of letters and numbers).

This doesn't always work though. What you may find is that the message (above) is not displayed nor does a firefox window ever appear.

Another way to coax firefox to launch is with the command firefox -ProfileManager and then create or use a new profile.

Yet another way (perhaps in some way equivalent to the last one) is to open profiles.ini and set the IsRelative tag to 0 then firefox should start normally and create a new user file.