How to upgrade FireFox on the Mac, 100% Clean

Apr 17

How to upgrade FireFox on the Mac, 100% Clean

In previous posts, I've given increasing detail on how one can upgrade FireFox in a 100% completely clean manner 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.)).

So, how is this different? Well, this set of instructions is the one-stop all-inclusive set of directions (for Mac users) for upgrading cleanly to the latest version of FireFox. (This was originally an adaptation of this set of instructions here (it's written for PC users... I'm Mac).)

After downloading the latest version of FireFox, close your browser and rename your current version to something other than FireFox.app (like FireFox 1.0.0.app).
Install and run the new version of FireFox.

Then copy the following files:

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

from the

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/default.xxx/

directory (or xxxxxxx.default/ directory) to a backup directory (on your Desktop, for example).

Also copy any searchbar plugins that you've installed from the
```
/Applications/FireFox 1.0.0.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins
```
directory to a temporary location.
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.
You'll also need to remove (or move) the profiles.ini file from the ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ 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.)
Restart Firefox. It will create a new xxxxxxx.default/ directory.
Quit Firefox.
Now, copy the files from above back to the new xxxxxxx.default/ directory. Also copy the searchbar plugins back to FireFox.app.
Finally, restart Firefox. This should give you your old Firefox, with all it's preferences, etc. restored. You might also want to open up Safari and in Safari's Preferences set FireFox.app as your default browser (or it will stay as the old version of FireFox.app... whatever you renamed it to).
You'll also have to look at your old FireFox.app and decide which of the extensions you had should be reinstalled. An easy way to do this is to go through your old install log located at
```
/Applications/FireFox 1.0.0.app/Contents/MacOS/install.log
```
You can go to https://addons.mozilla.org/ and get new extensions and themes.

Here are some of my favorite FireFox extensions (I've confirmed that you can get the older versions of the first two listed here running by following these instructions: "Make old extensions work with new FireFox"):
These don't seem to work in FireFox 1.5:
- Greasemonkey (Googlewhacker)
Make sure to do things like point Launchbar back at your bookmarks, resetting the "open URLs in a new tab" option in the Advanced settings of Firefox or any other thing that you notice out of whack.

UPDATE [2005-12-03T12:08:04]: Confirmed that this works with Firefox 1.5.

3 comments

§ Brian said on : 04/18/05 @ 08:17
What? No script to automate this process? I expected more from Joe... ;-)
§ joe® said on : 04/18/05 @ 08:25
I suppose a script could be written for items 1-9.
§ John Elford said on : 05/13/05 @ 00:34
I just binned my previous program and put the new version (1.0.4) in its place, and it all seems to work fine - the same bookmarks, cookies etc all seem to be there. But perhaps I'm missing something . . .