Creating a new Firefox profile, was: Garbled output with Firefox 77

[Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012%yahoo.com@localhost>]

On Mon, 8 Jun 2020 at 13:19, Robert Swindells <rjs%fdy2.co.uk@localhost> wrote:

> I had given up and renamed my old ~/.mozilla directory so that firefox
> would create a new one, then just imported the old bookmarks. This was a
> good idea anyway as my old saved passwords had not been correctly
> handled by a previous version change.

This is what I do before performing substantial Firefox upgrades and
saves me banging my head to the wall later on:

1) Save my bookmarks in .json format to my Desktop or anywhere else.
(Contrary to expectations, FF won't do that for you automatically
every time you close the browser.).

2) From the shell,

$ firefox -profilemanager

Create a new profile but don't set it as default.

3) Test the old (current) profile and see if that works, otherwise:

$ firefox -profilemanager

again and set the new profile as default.

4) Import bookmarks from the above created .json file.

5) Copy key4.db and logins.json from the old profile onto the new one.
(More files that could be imported here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile

6) Add extensions if and when needed. (I've found that installing from
the old. xpi files doesn't always work).

We shouldn't need to do that, but this is the way Firefox works.

-- 
Ottavio Caruso