User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/45.0.2454.101 Chrome/45.0.2454.101 Safari/537.36 Steps to reproduce: mv ~/.cache/mozilla ~/.cache/mozilla-TMP touch ~/.cache/mozilla Run firefox. Pop-up box says "Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible." Click "OK", then pop-up box disappears, then firefox terminates. rm ~/.cache/mozilla mv ~/.cache/mozilla-TMP ~/.cache/mozilla Run firefox. Firefox runs normally. Note that pop-up box message is misleading: firefox's profile is neither missing nor inaccessible. The problem is with ~/.cache/mozilla.

This problem also occurs if .cache is a symbolic link which does not resolve. This failure to start up still happens for the latest Firefox 48.0 (supplied by Ubuntu), as well as Firefox ESR 45.3.0 (supplied by CentOS 6). For me, the biggest problem is that the message is so misleading -- it presents a pop-up with Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible. when it's a problem with $HOME/.cache. Note that Thunderbird 45.2 also has this problem, although the pop-up message there is Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.

(In reply to JskudMozilla from comment #1) > This problem also occurs if .cache is a symbolic link which does not resolve. > > This failure to start up still happens for the latest Firefox 48.0 (supplied > by Ubuntu), as well as Firefox ESR 45.3.0 (supplied by CentOS 6). > > For me, the biggest problem is that the message is so misleading -- it > presents a pop-up with > > Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible. > > when it's a problem with $HOME/.cache. > > Note that Thunderbird 45.2 also has this problem, although the pop-up > message there is > > Your Thunderbird profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or > inaccessible. +1 - I just spend a couple hours on this because my symlink stopped working when I changed computers. Needing $HOME/.cache/ is fine, but tell the user that is why you can't run, don't send us futzing with the profile which is absolutely fine.