-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 (TL:DR; How to use LegacyProfiles only for the initial run, to migrate the old profile's data into the new install, and let people use profile-per-install after that?)
For reasons which don't bear going into, my organization is only now initiating the upgrade process from Firefox ESR 52 to a newer version (ESR 78). We are, at the same time, also transitioning from 32-bit to 64-bit Firefox - or at the very least, we would like to do so. However, this combination - plus Windows' segregation of 32-bit and 64-bit programs into different path hierarchies, and the established practice of uninstalling old Firefox versions before installing new ones, as I understand is recommended - means that we're also hitting the "profile per install" transition, and without further action our users will lose access to the contents of their established Firefox profiles. Our users do not necessarily have Firefox accounts, and cannot reasonably be expected to create them for the purpose of upgrading (never mind what happens if they didn't create one before the upgrade went through), so restoring data from a previous Firefox via Firefox Sync - as is suggested by the "Important News" page that appears on first launching Firefox after the upgrade - is not an option. - From what I've read (both documentation and conversations), I gather that the established way to move forward on this for enterprises is the MOZ_LEGACY_PROFILES environment variable and/or the LegacyProfiles policy setting, to continue using the established single profile. However, it also looks as if the "profile per install" functionality won't be available for as long as we keep that setting in place; that wouldn't be ideal, because I can think of scenarios where being able to have two versions installed and used side-by-side could be extremely helpful, and I'd hate for us to be locked out of that indefinitely. Testing also seems to indicate that if we launch the new Firefox install for the first time using that "legacy profiles" setting, and then later launch the same install without it, the old install's profile will be retained and the generated new profile from the upgrade won't happen. In theory, that could let us thread the needle, and bring the old profile across to the profile-per-install world. However, in order to safely drop this setting and start letting people use profile-per-install, we'll have to first be sure that every profile which will need to be imported in this way has been so imported - and that will take us at least a year and another Firefox ESR upgrade, if indeed we can ever become sufficiently certain of it at all. It looks as if what I want is to have Firefox use the "import legacy profile" behavior for the first-ever run (per Windows user profile) with a version that supports profile-per-install, but not use it after that. I can imagine a contrived configuration to make sure the environment variable is set and unset properly for that, but every time I try to figure out how to create one, it quickly turns into an obvious fragile hard-to-maintain error-prone kludge. Are there any established solutions here? What are my options? I'm assuming that it would at least work to replace the contents of the new profile's directory with a copy of the contents of one from an old profile, for manual handling of special cases or backfilling if we turn off LegacyProfiles after a while and then discover profiles which hadn't been brought forward - but of course that's not a viable first default approach for an organization of any nontrivial size. I suspect I could avoid the problem for now by sticking with 32-bit Firefox (and therefore with the same installation path as before), which wouldn't be so bad at present - but that would only mean that I'd have the problem again when we eventually do migrate to 64-bit, and I expect it would be even worse at that point, because the fact that the transition to the new profile-handling model would already have been made could very plausibly mean Firefox wouldn't pick up and handle the correct profiles with the LegacyProfiles setting. Really, the ability to import a profile from another installation would be useful for that 32-bit-to-64-bit transition even more than from older to newer Firefox; it sounds to me as if it would be useful for other scenarios as well, including especially for various types of developers. I'm a little startled that I haven't found mention of any apparent established solution for doing this more generally (short of manually copying profile contents around and/or editing profiles.ini / installs.ini, which seem unwieldy and failure-prone). - -- Andrew J. 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