Firefox Community Forum

Ok, I screwed up.

I was trying to solve a problem I've been having with regular releases of Firefox and it occurred to me try the ESR release so I downloaded and installed it. The good news is that it solved my problem, the bad news is that I just barrelled into it without thinking, assuming that my logins and bookmarks would just transfer over like with regular releases. They did not. It turns out I should have made a backup of those things first and I can't open the old regular release of Firefox to properly back-up those things now. Oops.

I've been reading lots of forum posts here and elsewhere trying to get those files into ESR and I haven't been successful. From the profile manager I've located the profile that still contains that info and I've tried:

Copying and pasting the "logins.json" and "key4.db" files from the "default-release" profile into the ESR profile which didn't work.

From "about:profiles" I also tried to "launch profile in a new browser" of the default-release profile so I can open that profile and properly back-up bookmarks and logins but I get a prompt to create a new profile which I tried several times and only resulted in several profiles of the ESR release.

Then it occurred to me that If I could just delete all instances of ESR and open the old default-profile then I could back-up the logins and bookmarks, THEN download and install ESR again and import those files but before diving into that I need to make sure that won't loose my original default-release profile info.

So experts, does that sound reasonable? Delete all instances of ESR so I can open the regular Firefox? What's the best way of going about that?

Thank you.

Noticed the issue yesterday (5/21/2026) . My tabs were not what I had when I closed it the night before but from several hours earlier .

I googled for some help and was told to go , Help>More troubleshooting information> Profile Folder>sessionstore-backups and look for the backup I want , and rename as sessionstore.jsonlz4 (deleting the old one) . That did not work so as a temp fix I am using the session manager extension. 

How to fix this ?

The Firefox icon on the taskbar on my PC suddenly appeared to have a 'rosette' stuck to it. I didn't understand what was happening? I decided it was not relevant to me and while I was attempting to get rid of it, I unintentionally deleted my personal profile in "Profiles"! This contained many important bookmarks and the important password manager extension. I am not very technical, but please can you show me how to recover my profile? Many thanks, Norman Clarke

The regular version of the browser is open with a bunch of pinned tabs and a private version. And!!! If you close the REGULAR version , but DO NOT close the PRIVATE one before that, then when you try to reopen the REGULAR one, ALL OPEN WINDOWS AND TABS will BE DELETED!!! WHY?!?!

And these tabs are not saved in history, because they WERE NOT active in this session!

Where do developers' hands grow from?! Well, this glitch was a couple of years ago! But now?! A month of work preparation went to hell because of Firefox failure... How do I restore tabs that were just blown away by the browser?

So before few days firefox decided to automaticly update. after thet no pasword was saved in system. undery system data 2 files: logins.json-1.corrupt/json-2.corrupt without any data in files (but size is 130KB). i need these logins ASAP.

Running v150.0.3 on a Windows 10 PC. I have (HAD) 5 windows open with about a dozen tabs in each one. Just realized that one of the windows is gone! Every time I startup Firefox, I always allow it to automatically update the version. I have a bad feeling this missing window issue happened during the most recent update (last week?).

Has anyone ever experienced this issue or have any ideas how this could have happened? Any chance of recovering that window? I have weekly backups of the SSD containing all my Mozilla files & folders (Firefox and Thunderbird).

Thanks