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Or perhaps removing them will help even without reinstalling Firefox.
This is the error message I get:
Code:
# apt purge firefox
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package 'firefox' is not installed, so not removed
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
I have previously attempted uninstalling firefox.
Somehow it didn't quite uninstall.
Later I did an 'apt upgrade' and installed new packages for firefox - the browser started working normally again.
Now the browser won't uninstall!
Have you tried to just remove the profile without purging Firefox?
Oh yes I should've noticed that.
It is indeed firefox-esr on debian.
Yes just removing the profile is probably the best method.
But I don't understand why my Firefox browser doesn't behave the same as others.
So I'm going to start afresh to hopefully find out what the problem is.
When I opened the newly installed Firefox browser:
1. All my previous bookmarks are there.
2. The browser is configured exactly as before (font-size and add-ons)
3. The about:config settings are still the same.
4. The extra cookies do not go away in the 'Enhanced Tracking Protection' tab under 'Standard'.
I even did a cold boot and it is still the same.
Clearly my Firefox profiles directory in /home was never removed.
Maybe as suggested, remove the profile first - reboot, and see if there is any
improvement. If not, check if the profile is still present in /home. If it is, then move it to an external thumb drive and reboot again. How is it now?
If the profile directory has gone from /home, but Fox is still problematic run
the purge command again - reboot - and before doing another install try running autoremove to see if any leftovers are picked up (but check the list of what it wants to remove). Then reboot again and run the install command.
I believed this removed firefox.
I rebooted and installed firefox-esr.
When I opened firefox - all my bookmarks and settings were still there and the cookies problem remains unchanged.
I don't want to reinstall the OS because this problem of firefox retaining coookies persists with another distro.
Does anyone know how to completely uninstall firefox or do I have some other problem with this debian distro/
When I opened the newly installed Firefox browser:
1. All my previous bookmarks are there.
2. The browser is configured exactly as before (font-size and add-ons)
3. The about:config settings are still the same.
4. The extra cookies do not go away in the 'Enhanced Tracking Protection' tab under 'Standard'.
I even did a cold boot and it is still the same.
Clearly my Firefox profiles directory in /home was never removed.
What is going on?
This should have fixed things.
Question: how did you open the newly installed Firefox browser? By clicking on a menu icon? You need to find out which command that menu entry executes.
Maybe you have a secondary firefox installation somewhere?
In any case, purge firefox again, then do
Code:
find / -name '*firefox*' 2>/dev/null
(this will take a few minutes) and show us the result.
Question: how did you open the newly installed Firefox browser? By clicking on a menu icon? You need to find out which command that menu entry executes.
Yes after firefox re-install it's icon appears on the desktop.
Quote:
Maybe you have a secondary firefox installation somewhere?
In any case, purge firefox again, then do
Code:
find / -name '*firefox*' 2>/dev/null
(this will take a few minutes) and show us the result.
When you're acting as root user (as indicated by # instead of $), the "~" refers to root user's home directory.
Try running the rm as your user and/or being explicit with "/home/heathcliff" instead of "~" (as well as confirming successful removal immediately afterwards).
When you're acting as root user (as indicated by # instead of $), the "~" refers to root user's home directory.
Try running the rm as your user and/or being explicit with "/home/heathcliff" instead of "~" (as well as confirming successful removal immediately afterwards).
Thank you for pointing out that important detail.
I have finally been able to remove the firefox directories in /home:
Before I re-install firefox to see if the problem of removing cookies is resolved, what about the following directories that still have files referring to firefox:
No, don't do this, they have nothing to do with cookies. While removing the deb from apt cache is harmless, the other two are not part of a Firefox installation at all, and may be needed by applications that installed them.
The "persona" part is an unusual abbreviation of "personalization" (rather than a reference to the word persona, which could be mistaken for a synonym of profile).
It mentions Firefox because: "You can customize LibreOffice with the same themes available for Mozilla Firefox."
Removing it may or not break LibreOffice Help system. (Wouldn't surprise me if it had no effect and was re-created on next upgrade.)
A PNG is an image file, and in this example an image used for an icon.
There's zero reason this file would contain any settings/cookies.
If you only have firefox.png within 22x22 path and not in the other six (16,24,32,48,256), my guess would be that this file was in use when uninstalling Firefox before.
Again, if you want to be paranoid, you could move/rename the file as backup, but I'd expect it to return when you install Firefox again.
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