Sunday, August 05, 2007

How To Uninstall Firefox Completely And Remove All Traces Of The Application

Couple of days ago Firefox released security updates (version 2.0.0.6) and my browser upgraded to to the latest version through auto updates. When the Firefox browser upgraded to the latest version my favorite Firefox add-ons firebug, fireuploader and AdSense Tracker stopped working.

As most of my web development and blogging activities are depending on these add-ons, I struggled a lot to work without the add-ons. To get my add-ons working I tried uninstalling and installing all the add-ons, but it does not help me. Then I decided to uninstall the Firefox browser through Add or Remove program and install latest version. Even this activity does not help me to get my add-ons working.

After Googling for couple of minutes I got information on how to remove Firefox application completely by removing settings associated with my profile. After that complete uninstall I was able to install a fresh copy of Firefox with all the required add-ons and all the add-ons are working properly.

Here are the steps to be followed to remove Firefox completely

  1. Uninstall Firefox browser through Add/Remove Programs(Windows XP) or Programs & Features(Windows Vista)
  2. Remove bookmarks and other settings of Firefox by deleting the folder \Firefox from the folders Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla in Windows XP, or the \Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Mozilla and \Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\ in Windows Vista.
  3. Delete the folder \Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ (This is the place where Firefox is installed, and on most of the PC's it is installed in the path C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\)
  4. The final step is to remove all registry entries of Firefox with the help of Regedit application. Launch Regedit(Start-->Run-->Regedit) and search for all the entries containing the text Firefox or Mozilla and delete them. The entries which I was able to locate and delete in my registry are

    [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxHTML]

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla]

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MozillaPlugins]

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla]

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MozillaPlugins]

If you are using any other Mozilla applications make sure to  uninstall only Firefox related entries from Windows registry and installation folders.

5 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for that comment on the digg gopinath... and ya.. coming over here i found that you people have something which can drive people in..

BTW thanks for the Migratr :D

Anonymous said...

thanks. I was having some serious problems with my extensions and the regular disable / uninstall / reinstall / rinse / repeat just wasn't cutting it. I actually had to go into regedit to get rid of all my issues

--Sky

Anonymous said...

I tried your suggestions and it still didn't work

Anonymous said...

Well, it seems that there is no Fix of all fixes...at least not when we talk about Firefox ;-)

I'm troubleshooting right now. I've tried every tip there is for a couple of weeks now, nothing is working.

Seems it is an issue between Vista and FireCrash on my behalf, or that FireCrash constantly is leaking memory and that there is issues with Flash, java, applets, extensions and...well, even anyone with basic knowledge about this understand that there is a heaven for trouble to play around.

Anonymous said...

I use Uninstall Tool to remove programs completely including leftover traces. Though it's a shareware... ;)