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How can I completely uninstall Firefox, then re-install? My brothers Firefox icon is just blank for some reason on the Unity sidebar. It launches but the icon is completely blank nothing there. If I uninstall this for him and then re-install will it work? Please help. I want to get this fixed for him.

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  • What version of Ubuntu? 11.10 or 11.04
    – david6
    Dec 22, 2011 at 0:15

2 Answers 2

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First try moving his profile data out of the way, it may be corrupted. One easy way to do it is to rename the .mozilla directory, on a terminal:

mv ~/.mozilla ~/mozilla-backup

When you restart Firefox it will rebuild a new profile.

If you want to completely wipe out and reinstall firefox, on the terminal do this:

sudo apt-get purge firefox firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support

This will remove all traces of the Firefox system files. Then, to reinstall:

sudo apt-get install firefox firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support
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  • I don't see a good reason to tell the user the move the profile, since this is most likely a system issue. Additionally, the purge command doesn't do anything else than the remove command when used to remove Firefox, since Firefox doesn't save configuration files in the system directories. Dec 22, 2011 at 0:41
  • 1
    moving the profile actually resolved my problem with firefox Jul 8, 2013 at 19:58
  • E: Unable to locate package firefox-globalmenu E: Unable to locate package firefox-gnome-support
    – Line
    Dec 15, 2021 at 12:32
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You can reinstall firefox with the following command:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall firefox

If that doesn't help, see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1898600

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