Prevent bookmarks from vanishing after migrating users from the personal edition of Firefox to the enterprise edition
I am testing out pushing out the enterprise version of Firefox to a new customer. One problem I have noticed is that when I push the enterprise MSI (Firefox Setup 72.0.1.msi) from our RMM, it installs, but upon running Firefox after it installs, I get the following error...
"Using an older version of Firefox can corrupt bookmarks and browsing history already saved to an existing profile. To protect your information, create a new profile for this installation of Firefox"
So, if I choose the "Create New Profile" option which is on that same error popup window, all bookmarks are gone. I understand that the enterprise version might be a previous version of Firefox then what was installed.
Is there any way to not have it remove the users bookmarks? Do all of the users have to manually backup their bookmarks before we deploy the enterprise edition?
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Thanks for your answer as it was very helpful. Unfortunately, it doesn't give my the option to disregard. I either have to 'create a new profile' or 'close' which doesn't proceed to the app.
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In that scenario, the entire old profile folder with bookmark backups, history, logins, etc., should still be present on disk in the user's Windows profile.
Unfortunately, there's not a painless cross-profile migration tool, the user either needs to restore a bookmark backup or manually copy files, both of which involve some convoluted paths under AppData\Roaming which the user may not normally be able to see.
If you remote into one of those systems and load the about:profiles page, it will be a bit clearer, I think, which is the user's live Firefox profile path and which is the previous path (although there may be more than one for long-time users).
Finally, there's almost nothing newer than 72.0.1 that a regular user would have, so you could consider disregarding the warning in this case if that's an option.
Some possibly relevant articles:
- Dedicated profiles per Firefox installation
- Understanding in depth the profile per installation feature
- To apply an automatic bookmark backup to the new profile, once you've tracked down the .jsonlz4 file: Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer
- Manual file migration: Recover important data from an old profile
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Thanks for your answer as it was very helpful. Unfortunately, it doesn't give my the option to disregard. I either have to 'create a new profile' or 'close' which doesn't proceed to the app.
You could look into running with the -allow-downgrade command line switch to see whether that migrates the existing profile successfully. (Discussed in the above-referenced articles.)