269347 - If installing into existing Firefox directory, backup files and install into clean directory

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Installer, enhancement)

Description

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

When installing 1.0, it didn't properly update the existing files for Daa's
private build of 1.0PR, and I couldn't work with bookmarks obviously because of
binary version issues. It should be unecessary to uninstall Firefox when
installing it. You should be able to simply "upgrade". The solution is: If you
are installing into a directory that already contains Firefox, instead of
overwriting files in a haphhazard manner, they should be backed up. The steps
are this:

1) Detect it's already a folder containing Mozilla Firefox
2) Move existing files to [installation folder]\backup
3) Install the new files into [installation folder]

You can do this repeatedly, and will just get a long line of backup folders, like:

[installation folder]\backup\backup\backup\backup

As an alternative, you could do something like backup-2004-12-01_00 and wouldn't
get too deep a directory structure

Comment 1

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

The difficulty with this is if there have been plugins or other valid files installed then they would no longer be available. With official builds this is not a problem since files that are removed from the official builds are removed on install.

Since this scenario doesn't affect official builds and with the loss of plugins when installing over an existing install I believe this is wontfix

Comment 2

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

No activity and per comment #1 resolving -> wontfix