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Fix for: Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.

Tobias Kraze
July 20, 2011Software engineer at makandra GmbH

If you use Selenium and Launchy to open web pages, you might run into an error saying "Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible.".

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This happens because Launchy tries to use your Firefox running the web driver to open the page.

For Launchy < 0.4.x, as a workaround you can set an environment variable

export LAUNCHY_BROWSER=`which google-chrome`

For newer Launchys you also need to set:

export BROWSER=`which google-chrome`

If you want to do this in a ruby script, you can say

chrome_path = `which google-chrome`.strip
ENV["LAUNCHY_BROWSER"] = chrome_path
ENV["BROWSER"] = chrome_path

The strip is important!

Using other browsers

If you use Chrome for your daily work you may be annoyed by Launchy spamming your work browser.

Use another one instead, e.g. Epiphany which is very lightweight. Install it with sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser. Then, you can set:

LAUNCHY_BROWSER=`which epiphany`
BROWSER=`which epiphany`
Posted by Tobias Kraze to makandra dev (2011-07-20 15:39)