I eventually discovered the culprit was AppArmor. I tested this by disabling it completely, but eventually decided just to disable the Firefox profile, using instructions here.
sudo ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox /etc/apparmor.d/disable/ sudo apparmor_parser -R /etc/apparmor.d/disable/usr.bin.firefox You may need to reboot for this to take effect.