Recently, my trusty Mozilla Firefox web browser has been loading kind of slow, acting a little glitchy. So I uninstalled it – completely, I thought – and used my not as trusty Internets Exploder browser to navigate to mozilla.com for a new one. It’s working fine, so far.
Wanna know something weird though? All my toolbar add-ons, saved stuff, bookmarks, etc., are still there. I wouldn’t have cared otherwise, because that’s all backed up on MyYahoo! anyhoo.
But where was it all stored, if I uninstalled the software? How do they do that?
Now I realize that doing the uninstall through the control panel does not remove the software from the hard drive. It uninstalls it, unregisters it – removes it from the Registry, so that it’s just sitting there, disassociated. Estranged, in a sense. It’s a download that is no longer installed. But I thought that if you uninstalled it, add-ons like Yahoo Toolbar and cookies were wiped. I guess not.
Confusing.
Metaphor 
I watch just about every mention of "firefox" and "mozilla" in the blogosphere. Excluding splogs and other spam, that works out to about 1,000 post per day. If I see someone asking questions, and I have the time, I try to answer. Thanks for using Firefox.- A
Awesome. And you guys at Mozilla are watching for questions – on Technorati or something, I guess. I was just throwing the quesiton into the wind, not expecting anyone to care. Thanks a lot!
We store all of your "profile" information in a Firefox profile directory. On windows you can find that in Application Data. If you'd like to "really" start over, you can rename your old profile directory to .bak or something like that, while Firefox is not running and when you start it next, it will create a fresh clean new profile for you.http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile- A