1489553 - Restoring Firefox profile via MacOS "Time Machine" hoses Firefox.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[MarjaE]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20180714033244

Steps to reproduce:

1. Lost certain safety and accessibility tools after tryng Nightly.

2. Unable to restore.

3. Tried to use Time Machine Backup of Firefox Profile.


Actual results:

4. Backup was incomplete. Lost even more safety and accessibility tools. About:config reverted to default. Lost ability to use menus and keyboard shortcuts.


Expected results:

... 5. Losing recent work, but getting a functional installation with all needed accessibilty fixes, and retaining ability to use menus and keyboard shortcuts.

Comment 1

[u554753]

Not sure if this is related to Session Restore or not, please correct if there's a better component that describes this bug.

Reporter, have you tried updating to the newest version of Firefox? According to the bug report, this is affecting an older unsupported version of Firefox.

Comment 2

[MarjaE]

No. After the attempt to restore Firefox made it unusable, I deleted Firefox.

Comment 3

[MarjaE]

This occured in Firefox 61. I reported from Waterfox 56 because this browser has net been hosed.

Comment 4

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

All I can say at this point - the details are scarce at this point - is that I may be able to help when and if I can take a look at that profile, because it can be just about anything that broke.
Essentially, we just don't support this type of forward and backward compatibility, which is why we recommend trying out Nightly with a separate profile. Using Nightly with your default profile is NOT supported.

MarjaE, if you're ok with me taking a look personally at your profile to see how much we can salvage, please send me a direct email with a link to download it from.
Also please tell me which version of Firefox you'd like it to work on (I'm assuming the latest Firefox stable release).

Comment 5

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

For next time, when you decide to use Nightly again and if you want to go back to using Firefox again with a fresh profile, please take a look at this page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
This will allow you to move away from WaterFox, which I can't recommend using due to security concerns.

Comment 6

[MarjaE]

It's as complete as possible for a bug that destroys Firefox.

Comment 7

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Dear Marja, I marked it as incomplete, because there hasn't been enough data for me to move this investigation along. I'd really like to help you here and doing so might help improve Firefox to become more stable and it might prevent the same from happening for someone else.

So please, like I mentioned in comment 4, are you OK with me taking a look at your profile to see why it won't start up?
You can find it at "~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default", where the '~' stands for you home directory and 'xxxxxxxx' for a set of eight random characters.
Please feel free to email me directly so that I may be able to help out more effectively.
Once I'm able to reproduce this bug, I'll re-open it to work on a fix.

Thanks!

Comment 8

[MarjaE]

I tossed the profile once I realized I had lost my safety settings and couldn't cover them.