Migrating from Firefox 2.0 to 3.0

There are some problems when migrating from Firefox 2.0 to Firefox 3.0 (in this case Firefox 3.0b5), which is the case when migrating from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. For me it was not clear what was happening so maybe if you are experience some "weird" Firefox behaviour it might be also the case.

To keep things short:

1. Backup your bookmarks.

2. Close Firefox or kill it:
#---
killall firefox && echo done
#---

3. Remove your $HOME/.mozilla directory (or a safer measure, move it):
#---
cd $HOME
mv .mozilla .mozilla-firefox2
#---

4. Restart Firefox and start the painfully work of customising it.

Just a little history. I had had a Firefox 2.0 for a long time and when I migrated to Fedora 9 (see my road map) it also implies a migration from Firefox 2.0 to 3.0b5. The first thing, which was expected, was that my add-ons did not worked any more (compatibility issues). This was ok, I removed the deprecated add-ons and kept using the ones the worked.

The problem that first caught my attention was GMail, which was working just in the basic html mode (which sucks if you are used to the normal version). I thought that it was a problem with add-ons (so I remove every single one of them), it did not work. Then I start suspecting of Java (tried 2 Sun versions and open-java version), but it wasn't it. At the end I was suspecting some incompatibilities between Firefox and AJAX (which is what Google uses).

The very last thing, after a week or so seeking for an answer, was clearing my configuration directory. Which solved the problem. Don't ask me why, I do not know (and didn't bother to look for the answer).

The bottom line is: if you are experience some weird behaviour with Firefox, try to start fresh.