The Problem:
Lately, I have been hearing a lot of complaints from people that Firefox does not remember their preferences to stay logged into sites, after they close Firefox and run it again.
The Cause:
The cookie database file is corrupted.
The Fix:
WARNING: This will log you out of ALL sites till you log into them again!
You may also lose certain site preferences that depend on cookies. You may have to configure those again. These would not be settings that are stored on the site's server. They would be settings specific to your PC and not set if you used the same site from another computer. While it might be a bit of a bother to reconfigure them, it's not a common thing to store site preferences this way and it should only affect a very small number of sites, if any at all.
The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Google search. If you have configured it to turn safe search off for images, set it to show more than 10 results per page, or to open links in a new tab or window, you will have to set it again.
You will not lose any saved password information stored in the password manager. You will only lose all of your cookies.
Ready?
- Make sure Firefox is closed.
- Go here:
- On 2k/XP: C:\Documents and Settings\(your name)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
- On Vista/Win7: C:\Users\(your name)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
- On Mac OS X: ~/Library/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ or ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/
- On UNIX/Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/
- In that folder you will find a folder that has a bunch of random letters & numbers for a name and ends with ".default".
- Open that folder and find the file named "cookies.sqlite".
- Delete "cookies.sqlite".
- Run Firefox and log into all your sites again.
Firefox will create a new cookies.sqlite file with the necessary info and you shouldn't have a problem any more.
