Remove Firefox and Add-ons in Ubuntu – Complete Uninstall

firefoxuninstall

I have been using Firefox for a long time in Ubuntu, I downloaded some add-ons but it made firefox extremely slow, even if I remove them nothing will change.

I tried to remove Firefox also, but re-installing it will somehow recover the same Firefox I had- it seems it write some info somewhere that even if you remove Firefox, it will keep them.

Moreover, I am not able to use see any flash videos or website with Firefox(chrome works fine).. Honestly I tampered with plug-in settings in Firefox that this happened. But right now I can't do anything to overwrite the setting…

My question is how I can remove Firefox in a way to remove any previous traces and re-install a new version like for the first time?

Best Answer

Delete Firefox and all it's data:

I think this can be done in six easy steps, please edit my answer - or tell me to - if it's not complete:

run sudo apt-get purge firefox
Delete .mozilla/firefox/ in your home directory, should it still be there
Delete .macromedia/ and .adobe in your home directory, these can contain "Flash Cookies" stored by the browser. The same is true, if applicable, for Silverlight (Moonlight) and other plugins, they can allow websites to store data on your computer.
Delete /etc/firefox/, this is where your preferences and user-profiles are stored
Delete /usr/lib/firefox/ should it still be there
Delete /usr/lib/firefox-addons/ should it still be there

Mind the periods in front of file- and directory names: They indicate a hidden directory. You can tell your File Browser to show them by pressing Ctrl+H.

The 4th and 5th step must be done with superuser privileges. To start a the File Browser as a superuser, press Alt+F2 and enter gksu nautilus.

Finally, restart your computer to get rid of all temporary files. This should remove all traces of firefox ever being there.

Important:

Don't rely on this method if you've got sensitive information to protect! Deleting a file, in most cases, only means deleting a reference to it. The raw data will still be on your hard drive, and the proverbial bond-villain will be able to recover them. I'm only mentioning this in case it's applicable to anybody who reads this. The only way to really get rid of data, is to shred the hard drive to bits.

Related Solutions

Chrome Pepper Flash – Can Chrome’s Pepper Flash Be Used with Firefox?

This answer may be outdated due to recent changes to Adobe and Flash. This answer is left here as is for historical purposes.

Firefox is dropping support for NPAPI soon, which may make this answer out dated and invalid. It may only be possible to get Flash in Chrome, and only Chrome, at some point, such that there is no Firefox solution.

Since Adobe no longer supports Flash on Linux, Chrome is one of the remaining options that ships with Flash included. This is a Chrome special case, as detailed in the Flash Roadmap from Adobe in the Linux subheading under Personal Computers.

You can use Pepper Flash (called "Fresh Player") on Firefox. Webupd8 even commented on it here and how to get it working (the linked article was posted on May 29, 2014 and may be out of date). The plugin may be usable as it seems to be suggested regularly in the Ubuntu IRC chats as a solution.

The below is extracted from the Webupd8 post:

NOTE: The wrapper used for this is in ALPHA stage and is likely to be EXTRAORIDNARILY unstable.

To summarize the steps they detail, though:

Install Fresh Player Plugin in Ubuntu (via PPA), by using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install freshplayerplugin

The easiest method to use this means that you will unfortunately need to install Google Chrome for this to work. This is becauseFresh Player Plugin is just a wrapper for libpepflashplayer.so, so it needs this file which is bundled with Google Chrome. The easiest way to get this file is to simply install Google Chrome Stable - download it from here, then install it.

2a. Alternatively:
There are other ways of getting libpepflashplayer.so but I won't post installation instructions for all of them here.

Instead, I'll just list them below:
- If you're using Google Chrome Unstable, create a symbolic link from /opt/google/chrome-unstable/PepperFlash to /opt/google/chrome/ or change add a freshwrapper.conf file and add the /opt/google/chrome-unstable/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so path there - see step 3
- You can install Pepper Flash using 2 other ways: via the installer available in the official Ubuntu 14.04 repositories and via the Pepper Flash PPA which is also available for older Ubuntu versions - once installed, then you'll need to create a symbolic link for Pepper Flash to /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so or see step 3 for how to change the path to it.
Remove the flash plugin installed by APT: Remove/Purge these packages from the Software Center flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin adobe-flash-properties-gtk adobe-flash-properties-kde or just run in a terminal:
```
sudo aptitude --purge-unused purge flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin adobe-flash-properties-gtk adobe-flash-properties-kde
```
The Pepper Flash package doesn't replace the original library file, this is why up to this step, you can see both versions of the Flash plugin in the Add-ons page, and there's no way to be sure that Firefox will use the latest version. And you just can't disable one without disabling the other (If you disable one and restart, both will be disabled).
Optional (only use it if you want to tweak various settings): configure Fresh Player Plugin

Here you'll find an example Fresh *Player Plugin configuration - to use it, save this file, rename it to freshwrapper.conf and copy it under ~/.config/freshwrapper-data/

Use this configuration file to change the path to libpepflashplayer.so or to tweak the sound buffer if you have shuttering sound. Don't use it to enable hardware acceleration yet as it doesn't work properly for now!

The configuration options available in this file are pretty self-explanatory - you can configure the lower and higher bound for the audio buffer size, change the Xinerama screen used to acquire fullscreen window geometry (default: 0), change the path to libpepflashplayer.so along with command line arguments (like enabling hardware video decoding).

Ubuntu – No Sound on Firefox or Chrome, Kubuntu 16.04

Thanks to Karsus I was able to track down the information I needed!!! When you install pavucontrol:

apt install pavucontrol

then you can pinpoint applications and see/control what sound output devices they think they should be using.

I had to manually set my browsers to use my headset for output. Sweet! Thank you Karsus.

Best Answer

Delete Firefox and all it's data:

Related Solutions

Chrome Pepper Flash – Can Chrome’s Pepper Flash Be Used with Firefox?

Ubuntu – No Sound on Firefox or Chrome, Kubuntu 16.04

Related Question