Firefox won't launch from Panel

I’ve recently moved to Kubuntu after the last update to Neon would not boot (just kept turning off all my monitors).
But now I have a weird problem where I cannot launch Firefox or Thunderbird from a panel (either as pinned to the taskbar, or as a launcher widget), however, it will from the menu

Any ideas? Thanks

Nothing from the context menu?

I generally don’t pin it to the taskbar, but when I do I get a context menu which has an entry to launch the profile manager, try that…

As a test drag from you app menu to the desktop and chose link here and see if that works.

@ben2talk Yes, the context menus open, but clicking anything shows a Firefox window open and close immediately.

@CCG Interestingly, I created the link to the desktop, double clicked and it opened. Closed Firefox and double clicked again, and it didn’t work. It even stopped working from the Menu, and I had to launch it from a terminal!

I don’t really understand, but both Firefox and Thunderbird are snaps, so I am very tempted to remove and install the deb packaged versions (that’ll also get rid of the thunderbird.tmp that keeps appearing in my download folder)

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Yea I would never use Snaps or Flatpaks for what I would call critical programs. I currently have Snap at all and as for Flatpaks only Nuclear which is a Spotify alternative.

If I may suggest if you haven’t already removed Firefox and can afford to rebuild your profile try going into wherever Snap saves Firefox and delete the .default folders and profile.ini. Then attempt to launch Firefox the way you normally launch it and see if it behaves. A lot of times it’s simply an extention that’s causing the issue.

I had previously used the profile editor to delete and recreate. TBH, I can’t remember how much I tested it without extensions loading (I use three: uBlock Origin, Cookie AutoDelete, and Dark Reader). Though that wouldn’t explain the Thunderbird failures (unless they share extensions?)

I have now removed the snaps for both Firefox and Thunderbird, and so far no issues whatsoever. So fingers crossed.

Thanks for the help and suggestions

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