Profile migration FF Rapid Release 84.x to ESR 78.6.x (Offline)
Dear all,
I am planning a move towards the Firefox ESR 78.6.x. Currently my customer is using the Firefox Rapid Release 84.x and need your help with the profile migration. The customer has a very isolated on-premises environment and does not allow the users to login into a Firefox-Account. Therefore the settings for Cookies, Cache, History and especially Bookmarks are not synched.
Environment details:
- Enterprise environment with several tausends of clients
- All clients on Windows 10 Enterprise between 1809 and 20H2
- All clients have always the newest Firefox installed currently 84.x
This creates a huge challenge to sync this stuff. Therefore I have now identified the following two options:
- 1 Allow the downgrade by using the environment variable MOZ_ALLOW_DOWNGRADE on Windows. For this option I am trying to find the real reason why this "Downgrade-Stop" has been implemented in the first place? What risks in detail do I take to allow this downgrade? Has anybody done this before and do you mind to share your experience here? How many issues did you face and how did you remediate the issues?
- 2 Hand over the migration to the users. Copy their current profile to their desktop and ask them to import their bookmarks manually. Not preferred by users and I can't even blame them for.
Is there any other way to automatically sync the profiles from 84.x to ESR 78.6.x without user interaction?
Thanks in advance Amir
Chosen solution
Yes the 25,000 have installed smoothly and in the whole enterprise there are additional 50,000 installations that are currently ongoing. But those 50k are managed by different departments and I have no detailed information about their progress. Although I am the contact about the Firefox ESR migration and if there would have been any trouble they would let me know.
Just in case I didn't point out the solution: We have decided to use the option 1 from my original post (by using the environment variable MOZ_ALLOW_DOWNGRADE) and to move forward slowly with the rollout. We startet with about 100 installations and increased the number gradually towards 1,000 and moved after 5,000 successful installation boldly to 10,000 and then to all. It took about 1 month. But it was worth it. Management was happy :)
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Hello everybody,
I didn't get any respond on my earlier question but in the meantime I have collected a lot of data by myself and can just confirm that using the environment variable has worked like a charm and we had a migration on about 25,000 machines with only 1 incident that has been brought to my attention. And that incident was caused by a user that had started firefox quicker than the installation could finish.
So feel free to follow this path. No need to worry much.
25,000 machines ?!
and this would equate to 25,000 FF browsers too ?!
- -)
Im eagerly awaiting a response from an expert, later today !
Chosen Solution
Yes the 25,000 have installed smoothly and in the whole enterprise there are additional 50,000 installations that are currently ongoing. But those 50k are managed by different departments and I have no detailed information about their progress. Although I am the contact about the Firefox ESR migration and if there would have been any trouble they would let me know.
Just in case I didn't point out the solution: We have decided to use the option 1 from my original post (by using the environment variable MOZ_ALLOW_DOWNGRADE) and to move forward slowly with the rollout. We startet with about 100 installations and increased the number gradually towards 1,000 and moved after 5,000 successful installation boldly to 10,000 and then to all. It took about 1 month. But it was worth it. Management was happy :)
Clearly you're a genius !
Thanks for the compliment. But actually just a regular Admin. Next step is moving to 64 Bit.
Just found the legacy-profile policy setting in the Windows GPOs. Looking into that too. It seems to be the only option to force the 64 Bit to use the 32 Bit-Profile, instead of creating a new one. Side effects need to be checked....
But why wasnt 64bit used with 64bit? It's more effecient for the machines. Right?
Modified by ·´¯`·...¸>-)))º> ~dbben
Absolutely. Unfortunately the customer has decided to keep the 32 Bit even on the 64 Bit of Windows 10 until now.
The strategy has now changed and the customer wants to move towards the 64 Bit-Version.
oh, i see
i did a google on the below. check out the articles so that you will be on the same page: upgrading Firefox 32bit to 64bit
and by all means, don't forget to backups of the os or FF folders, before you experiment :-)