When people have a issue with Firefox I’ve seen many people will resort to deleting their old profile (or folder) and creating a new one. This works but doing this will get rid of any passwords, history, bookmarks… therein. Having used Firefox quite a bit creating a new profile from time to time is a good idea anyhow as cruft, bad extensions, … can slow down browsing.
Manually
Copying the Firefox configs can be done by:
cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/
Backup the old profile and profile list:
mv xxxxxxxx.default{,.bck}
mv profiles.ini{,.bck}
Create a new profile:
firefox -CreateProfile <profilename>
This command will return the name of the new folder. Copy the basic settings to the new profile:
cd *.default.bck cp places.sqlite key3.db cookies.sqlite mimeTypes.rdf formhistory.sqlite signons.sqlite permissions.sqlite webappsstore.sqlite persdict.dat content-prefs.sqlite ../*.<profilename>
This will transfer the bookmarks, browsing history, form entries, passwords, personal dictonary changes, and page zooms. There might be a couple other things wanted to add (possibly your firefox preferences), take a look at Transferring data to a new profile for more information.
