Firefox 67 upgrade issues

[f0dder]

Hey folks,

When I upgrade from Firefox 66 to 67 (which is a pretty good idea because of security issues and stuff), the browser seems to lose internet connectivity. It starts up and tries to restore my tabs, but all of them are blank and in the "loading" state. If I go to "Help -> About", even the "checking for updates" seems unable to connect.

I've tried disabling all my addons, but that doesn't make a difference. There's no proxy configuration or other network trickery. If I reinstall FF 66, stuff works again.

Does anybody have an idea what could be wrong? Or, alternatively (and perhaps better in general), how I can export and re-import all addon settings in a fresh installation? I have a whole bunch of uMatrix and NoScript configuration that I'd really, really hate to redo.

[mouser]

How strange.. 
I wonder if one of the disabled plugins could still be responsible..
Don't have any ideas except to let you know that FF 67 is working fine here.  But I only have a handful of addons.

[f0dder]

I wonder if one of the disabled plugins could still be responsible..

Dunno, I would think they're supposed to be disabled when they're disabled - and FF67 works fine on my work laptop. I guess my profile on this machine might be partially corrupted or something, but the behavior certainly is weird.

Backing up and restoring addon data on a fresh install (profile) would probably be the best option, but I dunno how to do that - and the idea of tracking down the files manually seems so tedious, even if it's probably just uMatrix, uBlock and NoScript I need. Well, and the standard Firefox options.

[mouser]

firefox supports multiple "identities" -- you could try starting it with a different identity profile:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Multiple_profiles

Maybe that would help troubleshoot the nature of the issue and make it easier to test stuff?

[f0dder]

firefox supports multiple "identities" -- you could try starting it with a different identity profile:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Multiple_profiles

Yeah, I did try starting with a new, blank profile, and that works - hence my guess that my current profile might be semi-corrupted or something.

And that could definitely be used to try and identify files that have addon configuration, and manually copying them over, but... ugh

[tomos]

I've tried disabling all my addons, but that doesn't make a difference.

I know you say the above, here my experience:

Just after updating Firefox (from a recent version, but not sure which) to 67.0.4 - it's unable to connect to any sites.
FF has not been my default browser -- I only have a few addons installed, when I disable them, it works. Let's see:
when I enable uBlock Origin, Firefox is broken...

[Shades]

Running here an earlier portable version of FireFox (66), updated it to 67.0.4 just now with uBlock Origin, uMatrix, Disconnect and Privacy Badger add-ons enabled. Works fine here. Which are all the add-ons installed in this browser instance.

So it appears to me that Fodder's profile is somehow messed up enough for him to reconsider starting from scratch with a new profile.

In my case, I have the icons of these extensions showing up in in the browser. Right-clicking on them gives you a menu where you can select 'Options' and from there you can make backups from the configuration of each add-on. Import these configuration files in your new/recreated profile and you should be golden again.

[f0dder]

So, I ended giving up finding a "proper" solution.

Instead, I ended up installing the new Firefox, and creating a blank profile. Then (without Firefox running) I copied all the files from the root of the old profile that had been modified during the last month.

The I made a guesstimate of which folders I ought to copy - e.g. skipping stuff like "cache2" and "OfflineCache", but including stuff like "browser-extension-data" and "storage". (Worth noting: session state, like open tabs, are not in "sessionstore.js" anymore - when Firefox is closed it's written to "sessionstore.jsonlz4", and there's lz4-compressed backups in "sessionstore-backups"... as well as periodically flushed current session state in "recovery.baklz4").

With semi-cleaned-up profile, I was able to start Firefox and have everything working again, yay!

It would be nice to know wtf caused the problems, but there's so many files and folders in a Firefox profile that I can't stomach the detective work. But obviously it's files that haven't been modified for a month that's still being read and causing issues. There's files in my old profile folder that haven't been modified since 2007...

It would have been nice to be able to do an export/import kind of thing instead of the manual copying, there's still probably old crud in the fixed-up profile that's not necessary. But hey, at least things work now!