Shame on Firefox Developers!!

[Snowhog]

Experienced a Firefox 'gotchya' this evening. If it weren't for the fact that I am not a Linux/Kubuntu novice, it might have really p****d me off.

A new 'developer' version of Firefox was installed this evening, replacing my Firefox Aurora. I know have Firefox Developer Edition 35.0a2 (2014-11-10), Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0.

Why is this a 'gotchya'? Because it didn't automaticall import my existing Firefox profile; it created a new one. So, launching FF from my panel launcher; as I always do; I was presented with a *new* Firefox, and no bookmarks!!!

I knew were to look, and there was my prior profile folder, so I just 'restored' it.

But this should not have happened, or at least, I should have been presented with an option to restore/import my previous profile.

Shame on you Firefox developers. Shame.

[claydoh]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...eloper_Edition
They do state this is so, though I do understand the concern of not announcing such for current users. But Aurora is/was is the dev version, change should be expected. It ,after all, "Should be used by experienced users only who can post/report reproducible problems and work around issues."

Not surprised that it uses a separate profile, I run the stable and beta versions of Chrome, sometimes the "dev" unstable , and they all use different ones.

[NickStone]

Developer editions of packages are not upgrades and should not be treated as upgrades to stable versions. There are separate packages to the stable version and therefore are not designed to import your profile from stable versions.

[Goeroeboeroe]

The separate profile is on purpose, so you can use your 'normal' Firefox for browsing etc. and the developer version for, well, developing. Maybe you missed it, but I've read this on several places.
If you want to combine the profiles, here's how to do it (you've done it already, but maybe for somebody else):
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...eloper-edition
@NickStone: this is not some kind of prerelease or beta, but it's a special version of Firefox aimed at developers. As far as I know there's nothing really new in it, so at the moment I'm not going to use it. I've a heavily adjusted Firefox, so it will take me probaly ages to get the developer version the way I want it.

[millusions]

hmmm, not sure about the developer version, but i've run into this before, as in not importing/using existing profile with different versions of firefox,
when i played around with Suse or maybe Debian (i cant remember now) the version of Firefox with said distro was fairly old, the synch wouldnt work because of this nor the existing profiles.
there were some differences in new and old directory and file structures.
it's a little while back so a bit hazy but if i remember correctly the import function worked.
in the end i managed to install the latest version because the synch is kinda important to me with lan bookmarks etc.

you are absolutely right in saying it should at least offer this function

[Snowhog]

Thank you claydoh, NickStone, Goeroeboeroe. My post was/is harsher than it should have been given the info you provided. The 'change' from Aurora, which is what it was titled, to Developer Edition which I got last night, are different, at least in appearance, and that it created a new profile.

It's all good, like I said, as I restored Aurora's bookmarks.

And, apparently, you can run both Aurora and Developer Edition 'side by side' if one wants, although I don't know how, as there is only only one /usr/bin/firefox.

[TWPonKubuntu]

I've been using Aurora for about a year now and this "upgrade" caught me by surprise. I lost the bookmarks and restored from backup, but the "upgrade" was unexpected.

As far as using the "developers edition", so far it is functioning almost like the prior Aurora version, the only difference visible, so far, are the color scheme (not great, but workable) and the inclusion of Startpage search engine as an option (very good). I normally dump all other search engines and manually install Startpage.

The additional tools packaged with the Dev edition look like they are useful. I'll be experimenting with them and will report any glitches found.