Firefox 19 fails to launch unless sudo

Question

Hi,
Before a recent update, firefox was running fine on my fedora 18. After the update (via yum), firefox will no longer launch unless it is launched as sudo. Initially I thought there was something corrupted in my profile directory ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.ini and so deleted my ~/.mozilla directory so that it can create a new one. Unfortunately that doesn't do it.
I still get the error:
Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory.
I see that when I started the firefox, it recreated a new ~/.mozilla/firefox directory but didn't create profile.ini. I looked at the permissions and see nothing wrong with it:
[jade@localhost ~]$ firefox
Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory.
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -ld .mozilla/
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .mozilla/
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -l .mozilla/
total 8
drwxrwxr-x 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 extensions
drwx------ 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 firefox
I don't see anything wrong with permissions. I see that I own the directory .mozilla and subdirectories) but I'll go ahead and executed the chown recommended from other sites:
[jade@localhost ~]$ sudo chown -R jade:jade ~/.mozilla/
[sudo] password for jade:
[jade@localhost ~]$ sudo chown -R jade:jade ~/.mozilla/firefox
[jade@localhost ~]$ sudo chown -R jade:jade ~/.mozilla/firefox/*
[jade@localhost ~]$ firefox
Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory.
But still the error persists. Again, I'm listing the permissions of the .mozilla and its subdirectories:
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -ld .mozilla/
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .mozilla/
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/
total 16
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .
drwxrw-r-- 46 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 19:06 ..
drwxrwxr-x 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 extensions
drwx------ 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 firefox
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/firefox/
total 12
drwx------ 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 ..
drwx------ 2 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 Crash Reports
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/firefox/Crash\ Reports/
total 12
drwx------ 2 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .
drwx------ 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 ..
-rw------- 1 jade jade 10 Feb 28 18:43 InstallTime20130219173943
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/extensions/
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/extensions/\{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384\}/
total 8
Could someone help me? I really don't want to have to run firefox as sudo, but right now that's the only way I can run it. Can't run it as a regular user (jade in this case).
I also remove and re-installed firefox (via yum) and the same problem occurs.

Answer 1

Had the same problem today on Ubuntu 10.04 with Firefox nightly build. I tried all of these things too (short of creating a new user). Eventually a ls -alR | grep root showed that permissions on some files in ~ were not being changed. This led me to find the ~/.cache folder which contained a mozilla/firefox folder. chown -R me:me mozilla resolved the issue.