Firefox 71/68.3esr: Profile issues and bugs during upgrade

[Karlston]

Firefox 71/68.3esr: Profile issues and bugs during upgrade

On December 3, 2019 Mozilla’s developers released the next major version 71 as well as the 68.3esr of the Firefox browser. The update does not work for all users. Some users are claiming damaged/deleted profiles and lost addons. Here is a short overview of the known issues.

 

In the blog post Firefox 71 and 68.3.0esr released I mentioned the new versions for the Firefox browser and the changes. The update to Firefox 71 portable (32 bit) worked fine for me – I could not find any errors during a quick test. But shortly after the publication of the article I got the first feedback about issues from my German blog readers. I’ll compil it here together – maybe there’s some feedback, if these are just single cases or if there are bigger problems.

Firefox 68.3esr: Profile damaged during upgrade

Some users have experienced issues during upgrade with Firefox ESR. There are reports, that user profile is corrupted or missing, when upgrading to version 68.3. German blog reader Andy writes here:

Hmm, within the company the default profile of the 68.3 ESR was damaged after upgrade. There was a message with “new profile format” and then everything was broken. Using Firefox.exe -P I was able to restore the old profile, so half as bad. I will roll it out during operation but definitely not 😞

German blog reader deoroller noticed, that the policies.json file was gone after upgrading to the new Firefox 68.3esr.

After the update, the distribution folder with policies.json was gone.

I’m not sure, if it’s related to Firefox 68.3esr or Firefox 71 (but I got an additional comment, that also Firefox 71 has the same issue). Also German blog reader reported a lost file policies.json and missing addons.

Great, Mozilla,
Profile bricked, addons gone, and policies.json no longer found.
The portable version is affected to the same extent

 

Luckily I did a test before rolling out

I haven’t found anything on the Internet yet in a quick search. Is there anyone else affected by corrupted profiles or missing addons?

 

 

Source: Firefox 71/68.3esr: Profile issues and bugs during upgrade (Born's Tech and Windows World)

[Whoopenstein]

Firefox wouldn't even start and would crash after update from 70.01 to 71 (2 laptops). It turned out to be an old version of Comodo Free Firewall that caused the problem. Now I have to look for another firewall program.

[cosy]

I also experienced the same story here with the new version.

Hopefully we are getting a fix for this soon as possible

[Kalju]

I don't have any problems, ie it cannot be the problem with FF. Most likely is problem with old profile.

I don't know what the problem with Your Firefox, but I recommend to use different profiles for Firefox 71 and Firefox 68-ESR, because they are now a bit different and may not work with the same user profile.
If Your profile is already damaged, then there is nothing to fix. Helps only new profile. Usually bookmarks and login data can use.

[cosy]

The only thing I did, was to use my old backup I made before the update, updated and restored the backup, and I was ready to go

This one saved my coffee 😎

[Whoopenstein]

It seems like Mozilla is having an upgrade meltdown lately. A recent update of Thunderbird email client deleted two of my profiles. I had to re-create.

[shamu726]

Picture-in-picture feature with memory issue

New on Firefox 71 is the picture-in-picture function for video playback. Blog reader MrX1980 points out in this comment that there is still a memory problem there. 

The picture-in-picture (PiP) function in conjunction with WebRender has another memory problem that is currently being investigated. The consumption of GPU memory and memory is constantly increasing when PiP is used and the Firefox window is minimized. Sometimes OOM (Out of Memory) crashes occur.

(Memory leak in Firefox Picture-in-Picture feature, Click to zoom)

 

The bug has already been listed in the bug tracker in this entry. I tried it under Windows 7 – in the resource monitor the privately used memory slowly increases (the GPU consumption is not displayed there). If further problems become known, I’ll add them here.

 

 

 

Continuation from same article: https://borncity.com/win/2019/12/04/firefox-71-68-3esr-profile-issues-and-bugs-during-upgrade/