Firefox 3 upgrade switches bookmarks and other settings to older version

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If you used a pre-release of Firefox 3 and then downgraded back to Firefox 2, you may find that you get an older version of bookmarks or passwords when you upgrade to Firefox 3. Firefox 3 only imports your Firefox 2 data once; and from that point on, uses the data which is in Firefox 3 format. Because you have used a pre-release of Firefox 3, you already have data in Firefox 3 format; which is what your latest installation of Firefox will use.

If you lost bookmarks and it didn't happen because of the upgrade to Firefox 3, see Lost Bookmarks.

To retrieve your settings from Firefox 2:

  1. From the menu at the top of the Firefox windowbar, select FileFirefox and then select the ExitQuit FirefoxQuit menu item.
  2. Open your Firefox profile folder (read How to find your profile to find your profile folder).
    • Bookmarks and history: Rename places.sqlite to places.sqlite.bak and rename the .json files in the bookmarkbackups folder to .json.bak.
    • Passwords: Rename signons3.txt to signons3.txt.bak
      Windows:
      Note: If the .txt file extension is not shown, rename signons3 to signons3bak
  3. Start Firefox again.

Firefox should then migrate your Firefox 2 data to Firefox 3. If this procedure doesn't work and you end up losing more information, you can restore by closing Firefox again and renaming the files back.


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Page last modified on Thursday 04 of June, 2009 13:13:29 PST.
Contributors to this page: Chris_Ilias , AliceWyman , Bo , Ashish , lorenzoalali and np .