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When I upgraded from 66.0.5 it created a new profile, rather than keeping my existing passwords/histories/extensions. I'm not going to use firefox sync, so it

When I upgraded from 66.0.5 it created a new profile, rather than keeping my existing passwords/histories/extensions. I'm not going to use firefox sync, so it seems like there will be a painful migration ahead.

callahad 7y ago
We're defaulting to profile-per-install to make it easier to run different versions side-by-side, but you can still manually specify your original profile. Docs on the profile manager are at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-... ...or, as a super weird hack, you can set the envvar SNAP_NAME=firefox to get the old behavior (see https://github.com/mozilla/nixpkgs-mozilla/issues/163 https://github.com/mozilla/nixpkgs-mozilla/issues/163 for context)
- groovybits 7y ago
  Just curious, how large is the benefit of this? Does the average user run multiple versions of Firefox side-by-side? I consider myself a power user in many things, but never have I felt the need to run different versions of my browser simultaneously.
  - callahad 7y ago
    There are two sides to that coin: 1. People do genuinely seem to find it useful (it's been a feature in Developer Edition for years), so that's cool, but also... 2. Sharing a profile between different versions of Firefox can cause data loss, and profile-per-install makes it harder to accidentally make that mistake. So it's win-win. As for why people find it useful, I've mainly seen two camps: - People who want to keep their work and personal browsing separate. - Developers who want to maintain a pristine / default browser environment for testing, and a customized one for development. I've also, on occasion, seen normal people with separate browsers for specific tasks (only using Facebook in Opera, only banking in Firefox, etc.) Now those can all be different foxen! :-)
    - mthoms 7y ago
      As I understand it, this only affects running different official builds side by side. But what about running two different instances of a single build side by side with different profiles? The use-case I'm thinking of is something akin to Site Specific Browsers (SSBs), where each site has its own dock icon etc. Will this ever be possible?
      - callahad 7y ago
        That actually is possible, but you have to manually create the shortcuts. Check out https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-... for docs on the profile manager. Once you've set up the profiles you want, you can launch a specific profile by passing "-P profileNameHere" or "--profile /path/to/profile" to Firefox. You may also need to pass "--new-instance" or "--no-remote" to force Firefox to launch a new window if another copy of the same Firefox version is already open.
    - Vinnl 7y ago
      Additional use case: I sometimes give prerelease versions a try to report bugs, without intending to use it as my default browser (especially if bugs are blockers). It's nice to be able to get back to my regular install in that case.
    - groovybits 7y ago
      I see the use case for developers who want to test multiple versions. But as stevekemp said, the average user is losing their profile when simply upgrading from one version to the next. And it seems that the fix to this is to go back into the Profile Manager and set you old profile as the new default. Wouldn't this inadvertently cause data loss for the average user? (Ex: My parents do not even know Profile Manager is, much less that Profiles exist) If anything, I see this as a bad thing - especially for those who do not use FF Sync. Am I interpreting this correctly? We're talking about regular FF here, not Developer Edition, correct? Edit: > People who want to keep their work and personal browsing separate. I thought that's what Multi-Account Containers was supposed to help with.
sdfjkl 7y ago
Go to "about:profiles" and make your old profile ("default" by default) the default profile again, then restart Firefox. This was indeed a fucking terrible way of doing this: "Hey, we've just hidden all your profile data from you and to get it back you need to sign up to our web service!"
acemarke 7y ago
It looks like that may be related to FF now creating a separate profile for every installation. That was apparently targeted for FF65 originally, then bumped to FF67: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/hVeJSYjSnO4/discussion https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/hVeJS...
bzbarsky 7y ago
That's really odd. Had you used that profile with a post-67 nightly at some point or something? Some more information about the profiles involved here would be really useful. Are you willing to file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ ? If you do and give me the link to it, I'll get people who know the right questions to ask involved...
- stevekemp 7y ago
  No, I always upgrade to the latest release when I spot it, but I don't try nightlies or anything other than releases. I take a backup of ~/.mozilla and just download the new binaries to /opt/firefox. (Well I download and update a symlink.)
  - callahad 7y ago
    We might be resolving symlinks to their physical paths, making each download look like a new install. If so, the nixpkgs issue I mentioned above is probably more relevant than expected. I'm not entirely certain, but if you want to source dive, nsXREDirProvider::GetInstallHash is a good place to start: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/6c9f60f8cc064a1005cd8141ecd526578ae9da7a/toolkit/xre/nsXREDirProvider.cpp#1178 https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/6c9f60f8cc064a1005...

callahad 7y ago

We're defaulting to profile-per-install to make it easier to run different versions side-by-side, but you can still manually specify your original profile. Docs on the profile manager are at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-... ...or, as a super weird hack, you can set the envvar SNAP_NAME=firefox to get the old behavior (see https://github.com/mozilla/nixpkgs-mozilla/issues/163 https://github.com/mozilla/nixpkgs-mozilla/issues/163 for context)

groovybits 7y ago
Just curious, how large is the benefit of this? Does the average user run multiple versions of Firefox side-by-side? I consider myself a power user in many things, but never have I felt the need to run different versions of my browser simultaneously.
- callahad 7y ago
  There are two sides to that coin: 1. People do genuinely seem to find it useful (it's been a feature in Developer Edition for years), so that's cool, but also... 2. Sharing a profile between different versions of Firefox can cause data loss, and profile-per-install makes it harder to accidentally make that mistake. So it's win-win. As for why people find it useful, I've mainly seen two camps: - People who want to keep their work and personal browsing separate. - Developers who want to maintain a pristine / default browser environment for testing, and a customized one for development. I've also, on occasion, seen normal people with separate browsers for specific tasks (only using Facebook in Opera, only banking in Firefox, etc.) Now those can all be different foxen! :-)
  - mthoms 7y ago
    As I understand it, this only affects running different official builds side by side. But what about running two different instances of a single build side by side with different profiles? The use-case I'm thinking of is something akin to Site Specific Browsers (SSBs), where each site has its own dock icon etc. Will this ever be possible?
    - callahad 7y ago
      That actually is possible, but you have to manually create the shortcuts. Check out https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-... for docs on the profile manager. Once you've set up the profiles you want, you can launch a specific profile by passing "-P profileNameHere" or "--profile /path/to/profile" to Firefox. You may also need to pass "--new-instance" or "--no-remote" to force Firefox to launch a new window if another copy of the same Firefox version is already open.
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    Additional use case: I sometimes give prerelease versions a try to report bugs, without intending to use it as my default browser (especially if bugs are blockers). It's nice to be able to get back to my regular install in that case.
  - groovybits 7y ago
    I see the use case for developers who want to test multiple versions. But as stevekemp said, the average user is losing their profile when simply upgrading from one version to the next. And it seems that the fix to this is to go back into the Profile Manager and set you old profile as the new default. Wouldn't this inadvertently cause data loss for the average user? (Ex: My parents do not even know Profile Manager is, much less that Profiles exist) If anything, I see this as a bad thing - especially for those who do not use FF Sync. Am I interpreting this correctly? We're talking about regular FF here, not Developer Edition, correct? Edit: > People who want to keep their work and personal browsing separate. I thought that's what Multi-Account Containers was supposed to help with.

sdfjkl 7y ago

Go to "about:profiles" and make your old profile ("default" by default) the default profile again, then restart Firefox. This was indeed a fucking terrible way of doing this: "Hey, we've just hidden all your profile data from you and to get it back you need to sign up to our web service!"

acemarke 7y ago

It looks like that may be related to FF now creating a separate profile for every installation. That was apparently targeted for FF65 originally, then bumped to FF67: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/hVeJSYjSnO4/discussion https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/hVeJS...

bzbarsky 7y ago

That's really odd. Had you used that profile with a post-67 nightly at some point or something? Some more information about the profiles involved here would be really useful. Are you willing to file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ ? If you do and give me the link to it, I'll get people who know the right questions to ask involved...

stevekemp 7y ago
No, I always upgrade to the latest release when I spot it, but I don't try nightlies or anything other than releases. I take a backup of ~/.mozilla and just download the new binaries to /opt/firefox. (Well I download and update a symlink.)
- callahad 7y ago
  We might be resolving symlinks to their physical paths, making each download look like a new install. If so, the nixpkgs issue I mentioned above is probably more relevant than expected. I'm not entirely certain, but if you want to source dive, nsXREDirProvider::GetInstallHash is a good place to start: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/6c9f60f8cc064a1005cd8141ecd526578ae9da7a/toolkit/xre/nsXREDirProvider.cpp#1178 https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/6c9f60f8cc064a1005...