Another Firefox Update Issue

For the second time in a row, a Firefox update (through my distro’s package manager) has failed miserably. Well, failed by my definition. This is the second time a firefox update has completely lost all of my settings. Every extension is missing.

Is it time for a new browser to take Firefox’s place? Is anyone else experiencing issues like this?

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I experience that back when I was trying librewolf though I assumed it was a librewolf issue. Perhaps not.

In this case, it’s just Firefox not Librewolf (or Waterfox).

On Linux Mint by chance?

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What distro and/or flatpak/snap are you using ?

I’m on archbased distors on all my riggs at home, and they all run latest FF without any issues during or after the update.

Firefox from the Solus repo.

I’m a couple of months behind on DL podcasts, but having watched the one about Firefox concerns, I installed LibreWolf flatpak and have been using it as my main browser ever since. I have a very heavy heart about Mozilla. They’ve done some great work for many, many years and hope they listen to some of the community’s concerns and work things out. Partly I worry that funding is a problem. I agree, as has been said many times on DLN podcasts, that those who can, really should contribute financially.

Thankfully neither Firefox ESR nor LibreWolf flatpak seem to have had this problem on Debian 11.

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After digging a little further, I think this might be related to a profile issue. I did find two profiles within FF, but neither profile contained the configuration I had been using. I never created the second profile, so I know why there were two. I have learned that others have been experiencing profile related issue with FF for the past year or so.

Does anyone know how to backup a FF configuration/profile (without using Sync)? I’d like to keep my configuration local and not in the cloud.

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Well, one way would be to just copy the whole .mozilla in your home folder, to another location before updating. And after the update, if it “goes south” just copy back the .mozilla folder.

This might however not work every time thou. At least for me, it happens from time to time (at least couple versions in between), that FF complains about the profile being from an older version of FF. And that it’s not supported and therefore FF needs to be started with a new profile.

That’s the only way that I know of, if you don’t want to use the Sync function.

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The .mozilla folder will do the trick but then it might open a new profile, just open the other one from Firefox’s profiles (about:profiles), start it, make it default and/or delete the other.

Usually Firefox will start normally with your own profile after the backup of the mozilla folder but if you transition to a newer or older version of Firefox it it will open with a clean and new profile.

I tried both profiles, but both seemed to be un-configured with none of the previously installed extensions.