Metamask Cannot Open (loading white screen)

Question

I just tried opening Metamask, but it is not opening and displaying whitescreen with below errors in console :

Error :

MetamaskContentscript - lost connection to MetaMask Contentscript Forwarding MetamaskContentscript - lost connection to MetaMask Inpage
MetamaskContentscript - lost connection to MetaMask Background
MetamaskContentscript - lost connection to MetaMask PingPongStream

Image :

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Various solutions have worked for different people, depending on which versions of Firefox and Metamask they are running, and whether or not you have your seed phrase.

If you do have your seed phrase:

1. Disable and re-enable. You can try to enable and disable the extension. Right click on Metamask, and click on Manage Extensions. Then toggle the extension off and on.

2. Manually increment the odometer of Metamask's vault file. Every time you open Firefox this file’s name is incremented by anywhere between 1 to 10 (the next time I opened Firefox my file was renamed from 3040 to 3048). This file name is stored in a .sqlite file found in the parent folder of the file and if your computer crashes these might get out of sync. In my case the file was named 3039 but in the .sqlite file it was referenced as 3040.

   a. Find your local Metamask extension folder. On a Mac it should be here:

   /Users/{your-username}/Library/Firefox/Profiles/{your-profile}/storage/default/moz-extension+++{extension-uuid}^userContextId=XXXXXXX

   On Windows it should be here:

   C:\Users\{your-username}\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{your-profile}.default\storage\default\moz-extension+++{extension-uuid}^userContextId=XXXXXX

   {your-username} is your computer username. {your-profile} is your Firefox profile. To find your extension-uuid paste about:debugging#addons into your address bar and scroll down until you see MetaMask. The UUID will be labelled as Internal UUID.

   b. Locate the file whose name is a number - Inside the extension folder there will be another folder called idb and inside that folder is another folder named something like 3647222921wleabcEoxlt-eengsairo.files. Finally, inside that folder is a file whose name is a number (1 or 2 or even 3020). Mine was called 3039 and was ~300kb in size.

   c. Make a copy of this file - Copy this file and increment the name by 1. So in my case I named the copy 3040. If your file is 58 name the copy 59.

   d. Restart Firefox - Fully restart Firefox (press the command and Q keys together to properly quit the application).

   e. Open MetaMask - Now just open Metamask and it should be working again. If not, go back to step C and increment the copied file name again and restart Firefox again. In my case I would rename my copied file from 3040 to 3041.

3. Uninstall and reinstall. If none of the above work, you can uninstall Metamask and reinstall it. Of course, you will need to reenter your seed phrase.

If you don't have your seed phrase:

1. You can try opening the vault file whose name is a number (see step 2. b.) with a program called EmEditor.

   a. Download EmEditor, right click on the vault file, and select EmEditor.

   b. Search for words like: Keyr, data, d a t a, salt or s a l t

   c. Edit the data, do a replace all on spaces with no space, etc. until it looks like this: {“data”:“wwpXXtFCqZkYsWfeEwItZjJ0Cc7mRVjG47Dqh+ztL1PiCG6Izhg+zG0mM+H2ykyjz3X0RNhAE6IVsWFZamcZ47B4sVi4SvUxrMhARm5L3yHPxr3UsyGrOXmthyVMgEGmjwlmnFCNd2nMZ2o8/sRMra8FupurqevnBv57FiYpEEs7gPpFHv6587aL44MmKD8Snv4JLFqiqmlK82Waq5F+Iv9mw2sFVAL9mgZBSgFgbWdB3TsKVB2k”,“iv”:“rkUQlNcGTxBE0My7a/bCXw==”,“salt”:“HcKyNfGzaRALRQ0DlKgcIe5Uk30iI/M//oG6w8vX8Nk=”}

   If you have special characters in this file, you will need to open it in a Linux installation, like Ubuntu running in VirtualBox.

   d. Download Vault Decryptor and unzip this file to your desktop. Open folder vault-decryptor-master -► and open index.html file in the browser. Paste the {“data”:} and use the password you set for your wallet in the MetaMask extension and click the “Decrypt” button

References:

1. Github: Blank screen appears when opening popup in Firefox
2. Metamask Blank Screen on Firefox but no seed
3. Metamask Firefox blank/white screen