Upgrading to Firefox. Protocol?

[Quark]

I would recommend you first remove all traces of Firebird from your computer before installing Firefox, especially what Firebird had used to store user profiles.

You don't need to erase your profile. There is now a profile migrator in Firefox and it will move everything from your /phoenix/ directory inside Documents and Settings (which stores profiles), and makes sure they follow the new profile rules. No need to lose a profile. It's slightly more complicated for nightly build users (like me), because there was two profile changes since 0.8, but you don't need to worry about that since the changes have been in since before the 0.9 RC were released.

It's possible a few things in your profile might cause problems, but it's unlikely. If that's the case, mention it here and I have a pretty good idea of which files can cause problems so that you only need to lose/clean one file instead of the whole profile.

As for the program itself, you should either completely erase it, or install the new version into a completely different folder. I find myself installing to C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Firefox607 (if a nightly from 6/07) or \Firefox08M (if the 0.8 Milestone). This makes it easier to track bugs and run away from a nightly that's causing major problems for me :P


Re: Extensions
Extension Mirror has a good list of what is already 0.9 Compatible.

This topic also has a list of 0.9 compatible themes.

Any extensions already in your profile (pre-0.9 some installed in profile directory, some in program) will be disabled upon first loading Firefox, but you can re-enable them through hidden preferences if they don't have a 0.9 version. Again, ask something and I might have an answer ;)


Oh, yeah. As said before, wait for 0.9! If for nothing else, the new Extensions/Themes manager makes it worth it because anything written for 0.9 will already work in 1.0 -> no changes coming, just bugfixes. After 1.0, it will be easier to work with extensions b/c there's upgrade features built in to the new manager, and extensions have new information stored in them for what versions of Firefox they work with.

Edit: Forgot something. 0.9 is supposed to be released today. Bugfixes have slowed down to make sure they're all working, and we're down to two bugs that block 0.9's release. One of those bugs is just to make sure version information in the program is updated to 0.9. Unfortunately, the other one seems to be a PITA for the developers and they haven't fixed it yet. So any release will have to wait till that is fixed and tested (need at least a full day of using builds with the fix to make sure it didn't break anything else, probably).