How To Recover Your Missing Firefox Passwords

Firefox users recently pulled up their browsers to find that all their saved passwords went missing. If this happened to you, don’t worry: Your passwords haven’t gone anywhere, despite what it seems. 

The issue, as reported by Mozilla, involved an incompatibility between a feature in AVG’s antivirus application (password protection) and new Firefox certificates rolled out in version 67.0.2 of the browser (released a week ago). As Mozilla writes:

“The AVG team has been able to identify the source of the problem in one of the AVG features (password protection). The product protects users from the risk of stolen passwords stored inside Firefox and other browsers. For Firefox, it only allows the process signed by Firefox certificate to access the storage.

We have been able to identify a problem with propagating the certificate trust to all our systems. FF 67.0.2 is signed by the newly issued certificate valid from 5/31/2019 and the problem most probably is caused by this. We have manually fixed our internal certificate flags on our backends and updated the process for future certificate updates (expecting no later than 6/4/2020 )“

To fix this, there are two steps you should take. First, you’ll have to update AVG to the latest virus definitions—version 19061402, at minimum. You might have to restart your computer as part of the process, so make sure you’ve saved anything you’re doing.

Next, you’ll want to install this Firefox add-on to restore your saved passwords. If that doesn’t work for you, or you prefer to do things the manual way, here are the steps the add-on replicates:

1. Click the menu button, click Help, and select Troubleshooting Information.

2. Under Application Basics, click the Open Folder button next to Profile Folder.

3. Close Firefox

4. Check if you see a file called logins.json in your profile folder. If you do, rename it to logins.json.old.

5. Check if you see a file called logins.json.corrupt with a June 2019 date in your profile folder. If you do, right-click on the file, copy it and then rename it to logins.json.

6. Start Firefox.