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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 '11 at 0:15

2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

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. – lovinglinux Dec 22 '11 at 0:41
up vote 1 down vote

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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