110349 - export passwords should be possible

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Passwords & Permissions, enhancement)

Description

[Hakon]

If e.g. going to re-install the whole OS, it would be quite convenient to be
able to save the passwords to a file before that. Then they could easilly be
retrieved with a importing feature.
I'm aware there are security considerations about this.
But then think, as possible it is for someone to run your computer and export
the passwords, as possible is it to browse those pages. Not very big difference.
Conclusion: If you want to block such a manner, you should simply have your
system user account password-protected.
So, the purpose for such a feature, is to eschew having to re-enter some 10+
passwords, every time I've installed a new OS version.

Comment 1

[Stephen P. Morse]

What about cookies?  What about prefs?  What about saved e-mails.  Surely you 
will want all those as well.

In reality you will want your entire user profile saved and restored.  You can 
do that yourself just by backing up your profile directory.  The passwords are 
simply one file in the profile.

So I'm marking this as wont-fix.  If my suggestion is not acceptable, then 
reopen this report.

Comment 2

[Hakon]

That sounds OK but, could there be compatibility problems?
If I go from (0.9.0) to (0.9.2) to (0.9.5)
Will everything work then? Since there are new features added to every release.

Comment 3

[Stephen P. Morse]

That should work.  We try to be backwards compatible whenever we update the 
browser.  If we weren't there would be an awful lot of unhappy users.

Comment 4

[Terri Preston]

Sounds great to me, verified

Comment 5

[Ralf Hauser]

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113581 seems to be a duplicate of
this with more hints how to do this profile copying.