How to Fix Looping Firefox Errors on Startup

Here’s something that I encountered this week when attempting to update my installation of Firefox (again, the updates seem incredibly frequent now). I repeatedly encountered the following error when trying to load Firefox after the upgrade:

Your computer must be rebooted to complete a previous upgrade of Firefox. Do you want to reboot now?

Even after several reboots the error would not budge which put me at a bit of a stalemate until I worked out what I needed to do.

You don’t need to uninstall Firefox but simply delete its application folder and reinstall from scratch. Make sure you download the latest version of the full installation first then complete the following (on Windows):

  • Navigate to “C:\Program Files” (on 32-bit systems) or “C:\Program Files (x86)” on 64-bit systems,
  • Delete the “Mozilla Firefox” folder,
  • Accept any administrative prompts that may appear,
  • Reinstall Firefox.

You should then be back up and running with your Firefox configuration intact (as that data lives in “C:\Users” which has been left untouched).

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