Upgrading Firefox to Version 3

June 23rd, 2008 · by David Bradley

Last week’s record-breaking flurry of activity over at Mozilla brought me up short, I am surely missing out if I don’t upgrade my version 2 Firefox browser to the all-singing, all-dancing version 3. But, what about my bookmarks, and profile, and add-ons, will they be list in migration?

Not if you follow simple upgrade algo from Justin Mason’s taint blog they won’t. However, there are a couple of steps he’s missed out and one that I’ve adapted to avoid a lot of bookmark porting and save you trouble in the future. You might also want to check out this Lifehacker post on transferring your passwords from FF2 to FF3, unless you don’t mind re-entering them when you visit your bookmarks.

Download Firefox version 3 here
Download and install FoxMarks, set up an account and sync your bookmarks with the server
Make a record of the add-ons you cannot live without, forget the rest
Install Firefox 3
Run FF3 with the command line command “-firefox -ProfileManager” (no quotes) to create a new profile
Install the new versions of your essential add-ons one by one from here (Missing add-ons may appear for FF3 soon)
Run FoxMarks (or an alt web-based bookmarks manager) to synchronize FF3 with their server copy of your bookmarks (Mason has instructions for a more traditional bookmark switch)
Enjoy!
That should be it. Apparently, FF3 is not the memory hog that its predecessors were and there are so many new features and security patches that you really should look into upgrading right now. Let me know if you have problems.

5 responses so far ↓

Deborah // Jun 24, 2008 at 12:39 am

Hmmm… I didn’t take any steps to copy my Firefox 2 bookmarks for the Firefox 3 install.

I simply downloaded Firefox 3, and then ran the install. My bookmarks appeared without any extra steps for in the new installation. My add-ons appeared without any issues, either. For those add-ons that weren’t compatible with version 3, I used Nightly Tester Tools at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543 and all the add-ons worked fine.
David Bradley // Jun 24, 2008 at 7:51 am

Actually, come to think of it, my bookmarks were in place even before I ran the Foxmarks synchronizer, so yes that step seems to be redundant! That said, I’d still recommend some kind of online sync tool so that you can be sure you have all your bookmarks accessible on whatever machine you happen to be working from.
Gaurav (I work at Foxmarks) // Jun 24, 2008 at 8:35 am

Hi David,

Thanks for recommending Foxmarks, though as Deborah mentioned, the good folks at Mozilla took care of migrating them across when you upgrade to Firefox 3.

That said, along with syncing, Foxmarks is also a great way to automatically backup your bookmarks. Our backup feature also lets you go back in time to see past versions of your bookmarks in case you accidentally delete a bookmark or folder that you care about.

One final bit that may benefit you and your readers is that you can view your bookmarks online by visiting our website and clicking on “My Foxmarks”. You can also view them from your mobile phone by visiting mobile.foxmarks.com.

Cheers,
Gaurav
David Bradley // Jun 24, 2008 at 9:08 am

Yep, I knew there were some good reasons to stick with it.
David Bradley // Jun 30, 2008 at 9:19 am

Here’s a reason you may not wish to be using FF3 if other people have access to your machine.

“…the new awesome location bar, it calls up history from secure sites as well! So if you use gmail which is on https, anyone that uses that computer after you can see the subjects of every single email you typed…”

That’s from Globetrotter commenting on gHacks