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Migrating a Firefox Profile from Windows XP to Vista (passwords, bookmarks, and all)

Posted 21 August, 2008 at 11:58pm by Michael Chu
(Filed under: Personal Computers)

I just built a new computer for Tina to use at home and decided to migrate her from Windows XP to a Vista Home Premium (mainly because I like to have a lot of OS's around, but also so she could get familiar with Vista as an OS). Naturally, I wanted to migrate her Firefox setup from the Windows XP laptop to the new Windows Vista system. It wasn't entirely straightforward, but it was by no means difficult. Here's how I copied her bookmarks, stored passwords, history, and other info stored in her Firefox profile from XP to Vista.

  • On the Vista machine, I installed Firefox 2 (not entirely sure about Firefox 3).
  • I then ran Firefox on the Vista machine logged in as my wife (so Firefox would create the profile directories) and then closed Firefox.
  • I copied the contents of the folder C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<only directory of indeterminate name> from the XP machine to the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<some random characters>.default folder on the Vista machine.
  • I then relaunched Firefox and everything was successfully migrated.

Hope this helps someone.

2 comments to Migrating a Firefox Profile from Windows XP to Vista (passwords, bookmarks, and all)

James, September 7th, 2008 at 12:46 pm:

  • Thank you very much

Mark, January 19th, 2009 at 3:09 am:

  • Thanks, I was struggling to figure out where the profile was stored.. :)

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