I upgraded from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4 a while back. Overall I have been happy with the new version, but one problem has me stumped: Firefox doesn't save some settings across restarts, e.g. popup blocker site exceptions and file type actions.
This happens in two separate Firefox profiles. Both profiles have "Clear history when Firefox closes" unchecked, and the privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown and privacy.clearOnShutdown.* settings in about:config are set to false.
The behaviour doesn't happen on another computer where I have two identical profiles with the exact same configurations; their settings are happily saved across restarts. I use Firefox Sync with both profiles across the two machines.
One difference is that on the problematic machine, my ~/.mozilla directory is a symlink, while it's not on the machine that works. It saves other settings and history fine though, just not the aforementioned settings, so I doubt the symlink is the root cause.
Here are some other details (the same for both machines):
- Running Ubuntu Lucid
- Using this Firefox package: 4.0+nobinonly-0ubuntu1~mfs~lucid1
privacy.sanitize.migrateFx3Prefsis set to true- All files under ~/.mozilla/firefox/… are user readable and writable, and all directories are executable
- The problem still happens in Firefox's safe mode
Best Answer
I think the .sqlite file may have become corrupted, or at least incompatible.
I suggest you back it up, then delete it. Firefox should recreate it on start-up. If after this the changes are saved between sessions, my suspicion is confirmed.
If this is the cause, either try to find a way to clean or reconstruct the file, or just suck it up and reenter your settings.