Firefox/Thunderbird not launching bug

[Colin Law]

On 24 February 2016 at 21:03, agents4jesus at gmail.com
<agents4jesus at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This isn't the place to report bugs, but I thought I'd let anyone know who
> might be having this problem how to "fix" it.
> Out of the blue, Firefox and Thunderbird decided to not launch. It was
> weird, because I hadn't really made any system changes recently.
>
> Some things I did previously:
> I installed RadioTray prior to noticing Firefox/Thunderbird not launching.
> I am using numix-icon-circle icon theme.
> I uninstalled, purged, rebooted and reinstalled Firefox, but it refuses to
> launch.
> I tried downloading the tar.bz2 file and running it (not installed, more
> like a script), and it worked (but for some reason, it needed sudo).
> I'm running Ubuntu 15.10.
> Chromium was working fine.
>
> I figured it out: Firefox/Thunderbird were trying to access ~/.gnome2
> For some reason, its owner was root and nothing else had access (neither
> read nor write).
> I then ran sudo nautilus and made sure that "Others" were allowed to access
> the folder.
> Now Firefox/Thunderbird are working.
>
> Was this not the best way to fix the problem? Any ideas why F and T weren't
> working or why that the folder was locked?

Probably better to change the owner back to yourself, as it should be.
Possibly this was caused by running a graphical application using sudo
instead of gksu (at least I think that is right).  So you should not
run sudo nautilus but gksu nautilus, for example.  You might need to
change ownership recursively for the whole folder.  I always have to
google to find how to do that as I do it so rarely, or look at man
chown.

I agree it is not very friendly of firefox just to fail.  Was there a
helpful message if you ran firefox from a terminal?  The fact that the
folder was owned by root probably explains why you had to run your
script as root also.  Probably firefox would have run as root also.

Colin