Firefox user experience

Firefox Development
#1

hi there,

i got my first desktop computer in 2003, my first browser was firefox and i stuck with it until around 2016 before switching to chrome. firefox has become the biggest pile of garbage software that i have ever come across. never has any software enraged and frustrated me so much as firefox does.
i was in the middle of digging through my old firefox installation with all the history, sessions and bookmarks that i might want to save, when i thought i should try the newest firefox version out of curiosity. after removing it and deleting the new profile it created, i started my old firefox again and this is the message that i get:

“You’ve launched an older version of Firefox. Using an older version of Firefox can corrupt bookmarks and browsing history already saved in your existing FireFox profile. To protect your information, create a new profile for this installation of firefox”

so now i’m locked out of my old profile. even though i ran the new installation with a new profile it somehow corrupted my old profile. you can’t make this crap up. and the cherry on top is that this is “for my protection”… ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME?!? if i hadn’t made a backup of my old profile i would be locked out of my own files. and this is just the latest story in the dumpster fire this browser has become.

i rarely sign up to forums because i can google 99% of my questions and find answers so there’s no point. i signed up ONLY to write this because firefox has become the most frustrating and aggravating piece of junk software i have ever used. i am never coming back and i will tell everyone i know to stay away from this mess.

#2

Your old version of Firefox presumably is trying to launch the currently designated default profile, unless you specifically directed to start up using a specific profile. Have you tried using the Profile Manager to select the desired profile?

https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles

If that profile somehow ran in the newer version, then there is a problem. The seriousness of the problem depends on the differences between the versions.

As you probably know, Firefox 67 introduced a feature/annoyance called downgrade protection. The reason is that many updates modify file formats in ways that make them incompatible with older versions. Thus, sharing a profile folder between different versions could lead to data corruption. The compatibility.ini file in the profile folder tracks the last version that ran the profile, and that flag is what is triggering Firefox to generate the message.

If there was no actual file format change between the versions, you can simply override the protection using the method described in the support article (or removing the compatibility.ini file). But if the file format did change, then it’s not trivial to use that data in an older version of Firefox, it would be simpler to retrieve a copy of the profile from one of your backups for use with that version.

References