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Comment by doix | Hacker News Reader

This is the epitome of technological blue balls. I really want to know what's going on. Have you tried making a completely new profile rather than modifying an existing one? Trying in private browsing mode? Making a new user in osx, installing Firefox for that user and trying to login?

I expect an update post when you finally get to the bottom of this!

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I tried two different profiles, one for Nightly and another for Stable. None worked.

UPDATE: I can log in using private browsing... holy shit, what is going on!

Do you have any add-ons that are installed on both Firefox and Nightly, but that are not enabled in private browsing?

Can you log in to HN on a separate Firefox container?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

Containers do not share cookies, local storage, caches, or other persisted data.

I tried that, it didn't work. I love containers, and it was one of my attempts to solve it. I forgot to include that one in the post, I've tried so many things...

At this point, I'd create a new profile and try again. I know that you've already tried both Stable and Nightly, but there is a possibility that both of their profiles have been corrupted by some external factor. If the issue is not at the container level, then it's probably at the profile level.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Sounds like a corrupt profile in FF. I was coming to look for a comment that mentioned this.

It does. But damn, two corrupt profiles? One on each Firefox? What is the chance of that?!

Anyway, my last attempt will be to create a new profile. I was avoiding that because it feels like quitting. It feels like destroying everything and replanting the soil hoping for a better outcome even though you have no idea what happened before.

It's just a debugging step. Don't delete your existing profile. If you confirm that it's fine in a stock profile, then you can use various methods to see what's different and find the bug (eg. “what non-default settings overrides are set in my profile”).

Private browsing mode is always my first test for these weird issues. Usually it then boils down to an extension, cookies or cache. It sounds like you only cleared ycombinator related cookies. Maybe it’s worth clearing everything?

OP tried two different profiles on two different versions of Firefox, so it's unlikely to be cookie or cache related.

I also deleted cache and disabled add-ons, still not working.

The successful login with private browsing makes me hopeful though. Maybe I'll find a solution :-)

Try FF 95.x? FF 96 broke a lot of stuff.

Have you tried using a different profile?

My FF profile was corrupted once and a lot of sites stopped working mysteriously. Clearing cache didn’t help either. It has to be a new profile.

Make an entirely new profile, I bet it will work. I'm guessing both the existing profiles have something set that is breaking login. No idea what it can be, unless you explicitly blocked cookies from the domain. Not something that you can do accidentally though.

Yeah I've been down this frustrating route before. Somehow your profile has gotten corrupt. You'll probably never know why.

Has happened to me for Chrome and Firefox. Creating a new profile works. Or if you're feeling paranoid, remove any trace of it from the system and do a fresh install.

I stopped trying to figure it out when it happened. First step I take is "refresh firefox" https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...

If problem persists, new profile.

If problem continues, reinstall FF.

We used to call this "dataloss", "corruption".

Try looking at about:support to see if there are any third-party modules (antivirus etc. loaded). That has been a cause of problems like this in the past. More likely on Windows and I saw you're running macOS, but worth a shot.

It's worth a try, though Firefox has discontinued support for NPAPI plugins since version 52 (March 2017)⋮ https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-plugins

The only plugins in the Plugins section of about:addons should be the OpenH264 plugin and the Widevine plugin (only if DRM is enabled). Both can be disabled there.

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