Migrating Firefox and Thunderbird

I mention it below, but it probably deserves its own entry.

I moved Firefox and Thunderbird over to Margie’s new machine from her old one. In both cases, the migration was a pretty manual affair, assisted only by a few obscure articles I was able to Google for.

Mozilla is missing the boat here. Migration between PCs is a huge headache. If FF and TB could do this easily, it would be a massive selling point. Alas, I suspect it’s not going to happen soon for a couple of reasons:

1. Migration isn’t sexy. New features are sexy. The danger of open source software is that the contributors want to work on sexy stuff. (This is parallel to the problem with proprietary software, where new features are favored over basic functionality because they are more marketable.)
2. Migration is thankless. Not only is it technically complex with a multi-platform system like Firefox (it’s not a matter of migrating Windows-Windows, but every permutation of every platform that FF and TB support), but it’s an issue fraught with potential problems, any of which will lead to blame and things being seen as broken. If you don’t provide the functionality, nobody can claim its broken, right?

Nevertheless, this process was more involved and problematic than it should have been. I’d never recommend it to anyone who’s not technically proficient. If Mozilla wants these tools to become popularly used, there needs to be something beyond “Well, if you go to a new machine, just start with a fresh browser.”

Migrating Firefox

1. Upgraded Margie’s Old PC (OPC) to the current version of FF (which broke some extensions, but nothing critical).

2. Installed the latest version of FF to Margie’s New PC (NPC).

3. Copied the “Documents and Settings/Margie/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox” directory (which has all the profile settings for FF) from the OPC to the NPC (slightly complicated by Margie being “Compaq_User” on the NPC).

4. Everything … pretty much worked at that point. The one FF extension that isn’t just an extension (RoboForm) had to be installed and brought in sync, but it all worked pretty well.

5. Added some new extensions for her (in keeping with what I use).

Migrating Thunderbird

1. Upgraded Margie’s OPC to the current version of TB. At this point, TB stopped working on her OPC. Yikes. Crossed fingers.

2. Installed the latest version of TB to Margie’s NPC.

3. Copied the “Documents and Settings/Margie/Application Data/Thunderbird/[default profile]” directory (which has all the profile settings for TB) from the OPC to the NPC (slightly complicated by Margie being “Compaq_User” on the NPC).

   This was a lot trickier than with FF, largely because that includes all the mail folders, which worked out to about 900+ Mb of data for Margie. Yikes. Zipped it and copied to a CD.

4. Modified the prefs.js file on the NPC to point to the right directory. Also, the profiles.ini file.

5. Fired up the new TB. Nothing. Doesn’t see the old mail. Pound at it awhile. Nothing.

6. Closed TB. Noticed that a completely new default directory got created (and the restored one deleted). Recopied the OPC profile in there, and modified the profiles.ini file to point to it

7. Everything … pretty much worked at that point. Breathed a sigh of relief.

If there’s an easier way to do either of these things, I couldn’t find reference on the various Mozilla pages. Indeed, even the article I linked to above is designed around moving a proflie within a given machine; the idea of migrating to a new machine and wanting to take your mail with you doesn’t seem to have occured to them.

Note that something like MozBackup might have made this easier (though it wasn’t clear that it supports the v1.5 of FF or TB — no reason it shouldn’t, but …) — but, again, if that’s the “recommended” solution, it needs to be a lot more clear in the Mozilla documentation.