Firefox uninstalled itself... kind of.

GotNoRice

GotNoRice

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jul 11, 2001
Messages
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I restarted my computer, and after restarting my computer I went to click on Firefox and it gave me the generic windows message indicating that I had clicked on a shortcut for something that doesn't exist. I checked the Program Files folder, and the "Mozilla Firefox" folder was no longer there. But, there was a folder called "Mozilla Firefox.bak". I deleted the .bak from the name of the folder and Firefox worked normally at that point.

My best guess is that it was in the middle of trying to update Firefox in the background when I did the restart, but still very strange. Has anyone ever had this happen before?
 
Nothing wrong with firefox, Ive been using it since the windows XP days. its been problem free for my many years of usage, and has been my only browser on all my systems.
 
Axman said:
Y U not on Brave?
Click to expand...

Firefox's market share is already low enough at this point that compatibility issues are gradually becoming a bigger issue. I never felt the need to seek out a browser with an even smaller market share. If I'm one day forced to use a Chromium browser as my main browser then I'll probably just use Edge.

I've had very good results with Firefox for a long time now. I was just surprised to have it simply disappear including it's entire program files folder. If this is an auto-update issue then I'll probably dial-it back and just update it manually.
 
I have heard of this before, but only once and I think it was for Thunderbird, not Firefox. Same symptom: desktop icon didn't work because it pointed to a non-existent destination. The solution was to reinstall. After the reinstall, it did keep all original settings and emails. The theory was that an update failed in the middle of operation, leaving the desktop icon pointing nowhere. Could have been the folder rename like you experienced. I do not think they checked for a .bak directory, but it was over a year ago so I might not remember all details.
I always configure Firefox/Thunderbird to check for new versions and notify me to download and install rather than let it auto-download and auto-install. That way I control and know exactly when it updates. Not saying doing that will prevent this type of issue, but I've not experienced it yet since I do not let it update when I am about to reboot.
 
GotNoRice said:
I restarted my computer, and after restarting my computer I went to click on Firefox and it gave me the generic windows message indicating that I had clicked on a shortcut for something that doesn't exist. I checked the Program Files folder, and the "Mozilla Firefox" folder was no longer there. But, there was a folder called "Mozilla Firefox.bak". I deleted the .bak from the name of the folder and Firefox worked normally at that point.

My best guess is that it was in the middle of trying to update Firefox in the background when I did the restart, but still very strange. Has anyone ever had this happen before?
Click to expand...

Looks like it was in the middle of a Firefox update when you rebooted.
Manually updating avoids this kind of crap.
 
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