1388210 - Migrating from different versions of Firefox is a disaster

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1098986

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[najoll]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0
Build ID: 20170731093123

Steps to reproduce:

I moved from Firefox release edition to Firefox developer edition.


Actual results:

The profile for the Firefox release version was not preserved. I tried to copy the profile to the developed edition.


Expected results:

All sorts of confusion and brokenness. This, and moving between other editions of Firefox - beta, nightly - should be made clearer and easier. That is so especially since some people will be moving away from the release edition in order to try to keep some extensions working (not to mention bugs in the release edition, such as those to do with printing).

Having it unclear about when versions of the program share profiles and when they do not, and having some editions share profiles but not in fact share bookmarks, etc. is just a terrible turn off and pain.

Comment 1

[najoll]

It turns out that the cause of at least most of my difficulties was a bug that has somehow persisted for three years and which consists in telling the user (with no caveats whatsoever) that Firefox will honour his/her choice of profile and then with no notification at all not actually honouring it. See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1098986