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.
8 comments:
Good stuff here, only people who are on Vista can't go through Documents and Settings. They have to go through User, their name, App Data, Roaming, Firefox, Profiles, and then the rest.
Thanks, Mitch.
This post was constructed from an instructional email I wrote earlier for an XP user.
Being an XP user, myself, I didn't think to add the path in Vista (or any other OS).
Sorry about that.
I have edited the post to include Vista, Win7, Mac OS X, Unix, Linux.
I think that should pretty much cover everyone that may experience this problem.
Excellent post. I have two computers, one that I use and the other my wife uses. My FireFox stays logged into my websites fine but I have noticed that my wife's continues to logout no matter what we try. I will give this a go and am forever greatful if it works as it's a great time-saver. Thanks!
I have not faced this problem till yet and I have account on 30+ websites which i use daily and stay online 24x7 .
But thanks for this tutorial .
Great post. Very useful :)
Thanks a ton! Totally worked.
Thanks for this - I have been having this problem lately and it is totally annoying!
this is very informative... thanks for sharing.
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