Why can't I cleanly reinstall Firefox?

laszloLL — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 08:01:09 GMT

I am really irritated that I cannot cleanly reinstall Firefox.
CCleaner botched my current profile and jeopardised all my shortcuts. That is a known bug of CCleaner.

After completely deinstalling it, I got a completely unexpected problem:

I just wanted to get a clean reinstall of Firefox. That appeared to be something completely impossible !

but I deinstalled Firefox, and completely deleted all my Mozilla profiles rebooted, and then tried to reinstall.
The installation routine pointed out that Firefox has been previously installed 🙄 and ‒ without letting me doing something else ‒ retrieved my previously botched installation. 😫

How can I cleanly reinstall Firefox, not taking over anything from my previous profile?
I struggled over 2 hours with that problem and got really angry about an absolutely inexplicable behaviour, not letting me cleanly reinstall.

Not letting the user decide whether the previous profile has to be restored or not, is imho not "best of bread" practices, is it?
I never had any other software putting me in such a situation without an issue.

Finally, I had no other solution than rolling back to a previous backup.
Is it really the way it's supposed to work?

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Why can't I cleanly reinstall Firefox?