One more quick post for the Easter holiday (here in Canada). I’ve started getting that annoying
“Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.”
error message again, and was looking for a quick fix (as I’d been logging into terminal each time to fix it without rebooting). To my surprise, the issue was way easier to fix than expected! All you’ll need to do is remove two files “lock” and “.parentlock”. I found the complete solution using Google here: How to fix “Firefox is already running” error.
What I find personally amusing about this is how I’m usually stumped with the little things instead of the “big” things. Maybe it’s just me. 
Happy Easter everyone!
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I just paste “killall firefox-bin” in the terminal and it starts again.
98 times out of 100 in my experience (with both FF and Thunderbird), this is caused by one of two things:1) your profile directory (parent directory for saved bookmarks, extensions, etc.) has a file called .parentlock which was created the last time you ran the program. When the program died and didn’t shut down properly, this is left hanging around. Kill it and all will be well.2) (generally only applicable to *nix/Mac systems) If your profile directory is on a removable/non-local partition (so that, say, you can use the same bookmarks/mailstore on different PCs at different times), if your boot/mount procedure bobbled and mounted the partition read-only, FF (and TB) will give this error, *whether or not the .parentlock file exists*.IMAO, the message is perfectly reasonable for scenario 1). HOWEVER, the team should add a separate test for read-only profile access, with a more appropriate/descriptive message.My $0.01997934246 worth (I’ll get this Pentium bug fixed one of these years…)
@Vadim P. - Thanks for following-up on my post. I should have had this information typed in the post. At least one of us (you) knows what we’re doing!
Hee hee hee…
Have a good one!
@Jeff Dickey - Pentium bug… Hee hee hee… I forgot about that one. Cheers!
(Smiling here).
Thanks for spelling out what I and perhaps others are doing, to cause this error in the first place. I actually recreated the scenarios and that’s exactly what happened! So maybe it not a Firefox error, rather a “Roger” user error.