Our shared home directories sometimes confuse Firefox, causing it to fail to launch while posting a dialog window saying that “Firefox is already in use”.
The only solution I’ve found that really works is somewhat drastic. It requires you to delete your ~/.mozilla/firefox directory, which has the effect of deleting your bookmarks.
To preserve your bookmarks, we must first export them to a temporary location, exit Firefox, delete your ~/.mozilla/firefox directory, relaunch Firefox, and then import your bookmarks from the temporary location.
Here’s the step by step solution:
1. To get Firefox to launch (in a somewhat hosed state) so that you can save your bookmarks, open a terminal window and issue these commands:
rm -f ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/lock
rm -f ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/.parentlock
2. Launch Firefox. It will be somewhat hosed, but you should be able to export your bookmarks by opening the Bookmarks window by selecting “Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks” from the Browsers menu. Once the Bookmarks window appears, click on the “Import and Backup” menu and select “Backup”. A “Bookmarks backup” window will pop up prompting you for a location to save your bookmarks to. Just go with the default values, which should save a “Bookmarks <date>.json” file to your Desktop.
3. Exit Firefox
4. From a terminal window, issue this command:
rm -f ~/.mozilla/firefox/
5. Launch Firefox. At this point Firefox should behave normally and you can restore your bookmarks by opening the Bookmarks window and selecting “Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks” from the Browsers menu. Once the Bookmarks window appears launched, click on the “Import and Backup” menu and select “Restore”. A dropdown list of of bookmark backup files should pop up, and you can select the most recent one to restore your bookmarks.
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