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Downgrade firefox without losing older profile

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  • Last reply by TechHorse

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The article explaining why one should not downgrade ignores a critical reason why one needs to downgrade and that is when it turns out that the new version breaks an existing website!

I got bitten by this when Firefox "upgraded" me to V143 after which point the ticket system I use to support my customers stopped working. That same ticket system continues to work fine in Safari, Edge, Chrome and Brave, etc.

Worse, when one does try to downgrade, the old profile gets removed which means you lose EVERYTHING you had (tabs, bookmarks and presumably all the settings and saved passwords, etc). You need to be keeping the old profiles around so that they can be accessed again should someone NEED to downgrade. Fortunately I was able to use Time Machine to recover the old profile --- but somebody just didn't think this through.

Much as I have loved Firefox over the years, I'm starting to feel that it's time to give up on it and move to something else.

Turning off automatic updates is not a solution because eventually one will choose to upgrade manually and most people won't remember to make a copy of their existing profile. Should one then encounter a problem, you're back to square one

Very disappointing .

The article explaining why one should not downgrade ignores a critical reason why one needs to downgrade and that is when it turns out that the new version breaks an existing website! I got bitten by this when Firefox "upgraded" me to V143 after which point the ticket system I use to support my customers stopped working. That same ticket system continues to work fine in Safari, Edge, Chrome and Brave, etc. Worse, when one does try to downgrade, the old profile gets removed which means you lose EVERYTHING you had (tabs, bookmarks and presumably all the settings and saved passwords, etc). You need to be keeping the old profiles around so that they can be accessed again should someone NEED to downgrade. Fortunately I was able to use Time Machine to recover the old profile --- but somebody just didn't think this through. Much as I have loved Firefox over the years, I'm starting to feel that it's time to give up on it and move to something else. Turning off automatic updates is not a solution because eventually one will choose to upgrade manually and most people won't remember to make a copy of their existing profile. Should one then encounter a problem, you're back to square one Very disappointing .

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David, have you tried the latest Firefox version, 143.0.3?

According to the release notes: "Reduced long delays when loading certain websites while connected to networks that block UDP connections. (Bug 1980812)"

Wonder if that helps with the site?

Also, you can override downgrade protection and force Firefox to run a newer profile in an older version by using the "-allow-downgrade" command line option. See: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CommandLineOptions (You may want to backup your local profile folder before doing this)

Modified by TechHorse

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