Upgrade causes loss of all firefox settings (?)

Chris Whitehouse cwhiteh at onetel.com
Wed Feb 13 13:16:26 UTC 2013


On 12/02/2013 21:38, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>
> In general, I don't upgrade my ports very often, so up until recently
> I was running a fairly old version of firefox (firefox-15.0.1,1).
>
> But over the weekend, I moved everything over to a new drive
> containing the latest 9.1-RELEASE FreeBSD, and with a complete set
> of freshly rebuilt ports, including the latest firefox 18.0.1.
> (As part of this process, I copied my entire /home directory over
> to the new drive.)
>
> So anway, mostly everything is still working ok, however at some
> time during this process, firefox apparently lost track of all
> of my personal settings... my start page, all of my bookmarks,
> and all of my saved web site user IDs an passwords.
>
> I looked in the /usr/ports/UPDATING file for some clue as to why
> this might have happened and found none.
>
> Looking into this issue a bit deeper, I've now learned that all of
> one's personal settings are stored in a directory having a name which
> has the following general form:
>
> 	~/.mozilla/firefox/????????.default
>
> where the "????????" part is some eight character apparently random
> combination of lower case letters and digits.
>
> The odd thing is that it appears that all of my old firefox setting
> are still alive and well and living under a subdirectory of the
> ~/.mozilla/firefox directory called "4up9dkb1.default".  However it
> does also appear that my execution of firefox, for the first time, on
> this new system I've been putting together has resulted in the creation
> of a brand new parallel subdirectory, located in the same directory as
> my original personal settings .default directory, but this new one is
> named "nh2ykiym.default".  And now, firefox is apparently saving and
> retrieving my (new set of) personal settings out of that new directory.
>
> So, um, what gives?  Why did this happen?  And more to the point,
> can I get back all of my personal settings just via the following
> seemingly intutive commands:
>
> 	rm -fr nh2ykiym.default
> 	mv 4up9dkb1.default nh2ykiym.default
>
> or will that break something else in some obscure but annoying way?

Is there a file .mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini? If so it should list 
which profile to use. Just change it to the one you want and it should 
just work.

I'm using an older version so don't know how the latest works

Chris
>
>
> Regards,
> rfg
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