Upgrade FF keep Bookmarks

[jwojda]

What's the best way to upgrade FF and keep the bookmarks and stuff? In going through the other threads, there was suggestions to maintain the default folder, but we have such a variety of machines and potentially an unlimited number of defaults folders.. i'm not sure where to jump into that.

When I install a new FF (pkgd through Composer's Pre-installed software), it just creates a new defaults folder to dump to the system.
Is there a way to script out or somethign maybe to do a search for existing defaults folder, and if found use that instead? Or perhaps take the BM files, and put them into the new folder?

[mm2270]

I think if you just remove the existing Firefox application bundle and install the new one in a single policy and leave the rest out, all the bookmarks and other personal stuff remains intact. At least that's how we do it and we've never had anyone complain that we've overwritten any of their bookmarks, etc. I just recently updated our SS Install Firefox policy and in testing everything was fine.

If you're looking to have the default folders installed if they aren't present,. there is likely a way to script that out. Perhaps have the pkg install drop the default folders/files to another location (/tmp/) on the System, then check in the user's folder to see if /Library/Application Support/Firefox/ exists already. If it does, delete the one in /tmp. If its not there, move it into place. Something like that maybe?

[jarednichols]

I've only ever packaged up /Applications/Firefox.app. That will retain the user's profile(s).

[jwojda]

jared, what about new users? when you lauch FF does it create the profiles folder if it doesn't exist?

[mm2270]

It will act just like someone downloaded Firefox for the first time and ran the app. It asks if you want to import Safari bookmarks, present them with the default Firefox start page etc and then create the initial profile in the background.

[jarednichols]

We also had a custom plugin that we installed into Firefox.app's extensions folder that would modify that first-run to suppress bookmark import, not warn about the free software thing and set the homepage.

[tkimpton]

I did this quite a while back see

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=4376

[jwojda]

something I forgot, if I don't keep the profile folder then our CA and proxy don't get imported..

So i guess i do need the .defaults folder...

[nsdjoe]

Back in May, we did a FF update (from v3.6 to v10.0.2) for the whole school district of 6500 computers with a policy that only replaced the /Applications/Firefox.app with the new one. All of our computers are on Mac OS X 10.6.6 or 10.5.6. No one complained about losing bookmarks. All user bookmarks are stored in the FF profile within their home folder at ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox . Simply replacing the Firefox.app shouldn't affect their bookmarks in their FF profile.

[John_Wetter]

We keep two packages live, one used in imaging "with profile" and one used for upgrades "w/o Profile". Having the same profile name on computers is nice if you do need to tweak something later within a profile, and for upgrades, yep, just replace the Firefox.app bundle. We've had issues before though if you don't first delete it and then drop in the new one so make sure you do that.

[charles_hitch]

For Firefox I always use PackageMaker. I find it easier because I use a distribution package containing the Firefox binary as one content item and configuration as a second content. Rather than including the profile from ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox, the configuration content creates a directory in /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS called defaults (or more correctly it adds the following to the defaults directory). A folder called pref and another called profile. Put all the default stuff you want a new Firefox user to have in profile (such as cert8.db so they will have your custom CA certs). And all the custom preference files in pref. (See this awesome blog about customizing Firefox http://mike.kaply.com/2012/03/16/customizing-firefox-autoconfig-files/). With this you can ensure all the preferences that you want to lock down are there, and all the new users get the extra stuff like bookmarks.