Unable to open http links from Visual Studio Code: Your Firefox profile cannot be loaded

Question

When I try to open a http-Link in Visual Studio Code, my standard browser Firefox is not able to open it. I receive a Firefox error message:

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

How I reproduce this on my machine: Create a document (test.txt), paste http://www.stackoverflow.com/ in it, hover over the link in VS Code and follow it via ctrl-click.

I am not sure if this a Firefox question or a VS Code question, or both. But opening links from other programs such as Thunderbird or LibreOffice Writer works.

If I go to ~/.mozilla/.firefox/ and delete the profiles.ini, Firefox creates a new profiles.ini with which links do open from VS Code. However, that way I lose my Firefox profile.

Versions:

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• VS Code 1.68.1
• Firefox 101.0.1

Answer 1

The problem was that Visual Studio Code always tried to open a different, non-existing profile than the one that Firefox uses. My profiles.ini in ~/.mozilla/ was not correctly configured. There was an entry

[Profile1]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=ezn6ueee.default
Default=1

set as default which was pointing to a folder ezn6ueee.default which did not exist in the directory. I went in Firefox to about:profiles, deleted this profile and set the one which I was usually using as default.