Suggestion: Profile migration tool
Categories
(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: Scott.Copus, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.97 Safari/537.36
Steps to reproduce:
Suggestion/Feature request:
I (and probably a lot of enterprise admins) would like separate profile migrator tool (not a Firefox.exe switch) that can upgrade specific FF profiles from source version to any specific version. Bonus points for not requiring to update it more than once... i.e. 52-->60-->68. Extra bonus points for allowing the latest tool version to upgrade to a specific in-between version. Extra bonus points for allowing a profile to be downgraded to an older version too.
thanks,
Scott
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Comment 1•6 years ago
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Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.
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Comment 2•6 years ago
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At the moment Firefox is that migration tool. I don't think we would work to break that functionality into its own tool.
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Comment 3•6 years ago
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(In reply to Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him) from comment #2)
At the moment Firefox is that migration tool. I don't think we would work to break that functionality into its own tool.
Are there Firefox switches to either a) allow it to migrate a specific profile or b) close Firefox after the migration (not show the GUI browser)? If not, I think there needs to be or it needs to be in a separate library/API and tool.
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Comment 4•6 years ago
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(In reply to Scott Copus from comment #3)
(In reply to Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him) from comment #2)
At the moment Firefox is that migration tool. I don't think we would work to break that functionality into its own tool.
Are there Firefox switches to either a) allow it to migrate a specific profile or b) close Firefox after the migration (not show the GUI browser)?
You can select a profile on the command line. There is -silent which closes Firefox before any UI shows up but that may well not be before migration of some parts have occurred.
(In reply to Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him) from comment #4)
You can select a profile on the command line. There is -silent which closes Firefox before any UI shows up but that may well not be before migration of some parts have occurred.
So you are admitting that admins don't have the option to migrate profiles without user/gui interaction, maybe this bug should be reopened for consideration.
I need to migrate +1000 pcs from 52 ESR to 68 ESR and it's a nightmare, a tool like the proposed could be helpful.
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Comment 6•6 years ago
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(In reply to Dimas from comment #5)
(In reply to Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him) from comment #4)
You can select a profile on the command line. There is -silent which closes Firefox before any UI shows up but that may well not be before migration of some parts have occurred.
So you are admitting that admins don't have the option to migrate profiles without user/gui interaction, maybe this bug should be reopened for consideration.
I need to migrate +1000 pcs from 52 ESR to 68 ESR and it's a nightmare, a tool like the proposed could be helpful.
I'm not sure I understand the use case. When your user first runs ESR 68 it will update their old profile automatically. What is the need to do this manually?
(In reply to Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him) from comment #6)
(In reply to Dimas from comment #5)
(In reply to Dave Townsend [:mossop] (he/him) from comment #4)
You can select a profile on the command line. There is -silent which closes Firefox before any UI shows up but that may well not be before migration of some parts have occurred.
So you are admitting that admins don't have the option to migrate profiles without user/gui interaction, maybe this bug should be reopened for consideration.
I need to migrate +1000 pcs from 52 ESR to 68 ESR and it's a nightmare, a tool like the proposed could be helpful.
I'm not sure I understand the use case. When your user first runs ESR 68 it will update their old profile automatically. What is the need to do this manually?
We talked about it in the Mozilla Enterprise mailing list and people say that users could loose some profile data (history/bookmarks/...) if I migrate directly from 52ESR to 68ESR, and that I should migrate the profiles first to 60 ESR. Maybe Mike Kaply can tell us more about that.
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Comment 8•6 years ago
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I might have misled accidentally. I know we had a problem with losing bookmarks/history in the past because of the schema change related to favicons.
Was that fixed? Do we now work without going through any watersheds from 52 to 68?
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Comment 9•6 years ago
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(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #8)
I might have misled accidentally. I know we had a problem with losing bookmarks/history in the past because of the schema change related to favicons.
Was that fixed? Do we now work without going through any watersheds from 52 to 68?
I don't know, but I'm not sure whether that would affect the outcome here
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Comment 10•6 years ago
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I've verified that we can go from 52 to 68 with no (obvious) issues. History and bookmarks are preserved.
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Comment 11•6 years ago
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Ok, I'm going to stand by the decision here. I don't think we should invest time in making any kind of migration tool for Firefox profiles, it would likely involve duplicating a lot of work to no obvious benefit.
We should of course fix any bugs that cause upgrading from an ESR release to the next ESR release.
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Comment 12•6 years ago
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If we can be sure that at least older 52.x profiles will always be upgradable for newer Firefox versions in the foreseeable future without needing to jump between intermediate versions, then that's a move in the right direction for those sysadmins involved in migrations/software release management/etc. If there's any existing documentation about this 52-->60-->68 version jumping w.r.t profile upgrades, they probably need to be revised to remove (or clarify) this wording.
While there's probably still some use cases for having a separate profile migrator tool though, I think knowing this now should suffice for me for the time being.
A little background.... In the past we built our university lab/classroom/public Windows images with a default user profile that included a Firefox profile with custom settings within it. Luckily we don't do that now, but instead depend entirely on GPO and a little CCK2 (for now). But for those still in the former 'customized Firefox profile' boat, the downside is that all "fresh" users who login to these public computers will have that always-older default user Firefox profile keep getting migrated. Also, back when we had a default Firefox profile being pulled in from the default user profile, it actually helped us out with Firefox able to load a lot faster instead of it having to build a fresh profile from scratch. This was a big performance boost for us back when we still had spinning drives. Now SSD's are common-place, that's mostly a moot point now. I still notice the slight delay in Firefox building a fresh-from-scratch profile for new users, but that's just me knowing in the back of my mind that an existing profile will always load faster. ;-) In this case, pointing a profile migrator tool to the specific default-user Firefox profile directory could solve this. Sure, there's other ways to do this such as post-install scripting but I think it would require admins to stay vigilant on keeping a master copy of their up-to-date Firefox profile on a network share, etc. Also, when you have an environment that forces system preservation (like Deep Freeze software or non-persistent VDI), then the're a little more work involved too. Stepping off soapbox.....
@dimas, do you have specific use cases where a separate profile migrator tool would work better than allowing Firefox to do it during first-run? I would actually be interested in how well your 52 ESR to 68 ESR migration goes and if you had any issues with the (now 1-step) profile migrations.
thanks,
Scott
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Comment 13•6 years ago
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Not for me, if we can migrate between versions without mandatory jumps in between I don't need a profile migrator tool. This week we are starting with 20 specific PCs and no problems at the moment with the migration from 52 ESR to 68 ESR. Next weeks we will migrate all the 1500. If you have no news, it's good news ;-)
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