How to Remove Extensions Manually in Firefox

Extensions are what make Firefox so flexible and powerful. Through the thousands of extensions available on Mozilla’s website, you can add new features and functionalities to this popular browser. Usually you go to the Mozilla’s add-ons website, search for the extensions and install them yourself. But sometimes when you are installing a Windows application, one or more extensions get installed into Firefox automatically. For example, avast antivirus installs extensions in Firefox during setup. Similarly, WordWeb, the popular dictionary software, also installs an extension in Firefox. These extensions cannot be removed from the Firefox options as the “Remove” option is grayed out. In order to remove these extensions, you have to do everything manually.

If you want to remove some of the extensions manually from Firefox because you are not able to remove them the normal way, then you can follow these simples steps:

  1. Open Firefox browse, type about:support in the address bar and press Enter. This will open the troubleshooting page for Firefox. On this page, click on Show Folder button under the Application Basics section. This will open your Firefox profile folder.Remove Firefox Extensions Manually
  2. In the Firefox profile folder double-click on the sub-folder called extensions to open it. In this folder all the installed Firefox extension files/folders are kept. But they are named using the ID strings.Remove Firefox Extensions Manually
  3. On the troubleshooting page (that you opened in step 1 above), scroll down and you will find the section Extensions where all the extensions along with their names and ID strings are shown.Remove Firefox Extensions Manually
  4. Match the ID string with the name and remove the corresponding files/folders from the extension folder.
  5. Restart Firefox and you will see the extension file/folder you deleted is no longer installed.

Conclusion: You can remove Firefox extensions manually, in case you are not able to remove them the usual way from the Firefox interface. All you have to do is find the Firefox profile folder and delete some of the files related to the extensions.

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