Not Quite a Blog

UPDATE [2005-04-17 20:18:10]: See this post for the most current version of these instructions.

In an early post ("Spread Firefox - Hot as Hell" 09/18/04) I detailed the steps one has to take to do a clean upgrade to a newer version of FireFox on Mac OS X while keeping all the goodies you had in an older version (of course, this doesn't work for themes or extensions... just profile information (passwords, cookies, bookmarks, user preferences, etc.).

With FireFox 1.0, those instructions need to be tweeked a bit:

An easy way to upgrade FireFox if you haven't done this in a while is hinted at here (it's written for PC users... I'm mac).

1. The trick is this: Install and run the new version of FireFox.

2. Then copy the following files:

   bookmarks.html // bookmarks
user.js and prefs.js // preferences
cookies.text, cookperm.txt and hostperm.1 // cookies
signons.txt and key3.db // passwords


   from the Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/default.xxx/ directory in your directory tree (~username/) to a backup directory (on your Desktop, for example).

3. Then remove the default.xxx/ (or xxxxxxx.default/) directory entirely (where "xxx" will be different for each Firefox installation). You can just move (mv) it to your desktop for backup instead of deleting it.
4. You'll also need to remove (or move) the profiles.ini file from the Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles directory. (This is what got me for a while. If you just move the profile directory, FireFox will think that the old default profile is in use because that's exactly what profiles.ini tells it to look for.)
5. Restart Firefox. It will create a new xxxxxxx.default/ directory.
6. Quit Firefox.
7. Now, copy the files from 2. (above) back to the new xxxxxxx.default/ directory.
8. Finally, restart Firefox. This should give you your old Firefox, with all it's preferences, etc. restored.
9. Now you can to update.mozilla.org and get new extensions and themes.