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How I experienced the FireFox (FF) Quantum update, delivered with version 57, on Arch Linux.
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firefox_quantum_diary.md

My FireFox Quantum Diary

How I experienced the FireFox (FF) Quantum update, delivered with version 57, on Arch Linux.
You may be most interested in the Migration Cheat Sheet.

The following was written over multiple days, with the intention of both being a backup guide for myself (since I do this on two systems) and as a guideline or information base for others running into similar problems or situations based on the addons they use.

Note: My previous FF profile was at least 3 years old and had been used on Windows prior. It had accumulated some cruft over the years, which is why I decided to start anew for this update.

Day -1 (2017-11-13)

Stylish has started to update itself to a quantum-compatible webextension. It complains about ~80% of my styles being incompatible, despite some of them only affecting websites and not the browser itself. Probably a syntax thing. (The problem with the Stylish update is that my tabs become unreadable, since I manually modified TreeStyleTab's colors to match my dark gtk theme, and some other addon makes the tab's colors white.)

After downgrading, I tried to disable auto-updates for Stylish, but FireFox freezes (with 100% CPU on a single core) whenever I try to open about:addons.

The author of the Image Search Options add-on has finalized his webextension (WE from now) port and asks for feedback regarding the update in IRC. I offered to help, but cannot export my current settings due to issue mentioned above, so I just don't do anything.

Day 0 (2017-11-14)

I decide that I don't have enough time at hand to perform an upgrade and refuse to run pacman -Syu. I pray that whatever package I need to install in the near future has not been updated since my last sync.

Stylish keeps getting updated every second FF restart.

Day 1 (2017-11-15)

Stylish keeps getting updated every second FF restart.

I decide that this cannot keep going on and try to look for ways to have two installations of FF in parallel. The solution is download a build from here and run it as follows:

$ ./firefox -no-remote -profile "path/to/custom/profile"

Don't forget to disable auto-updates before you close this FF.

Day 2 (2017-11-16)

Started looking for alternatives of incompatible addons (and some generally considered better alternatives). Initially doing this on my laptop with significantly fewer addons and open tabs. The results of this (and all the later steps) was compiled into the Migration Cheat Sheet below.

Moving onto my desktop, I start by making a backup and manually getting a portable 57 (not using my package manager). I then started installing various addons and moving profile-related data to the new profile manually. See below for details.

Later that day, I also updated my system firefox and added a firefox56 script that would launch my old profile with a separate old FF version, portably using the method described above.

A weird discovery was the creationDate property shown in about:telemetry. On my old profile it shows 16339 while the newly create one shows 17486. I only found information about this field in this bug ticket, but I have no clue how the data is interpreted. Could join the referenced IRC channel if interested.

Disabled browser.cache.disk.enable to only cache in RAM.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with the result. Startup speed (especially session restoration) tanked significantly after I installed my addons and a couple userscripts, so I might need to take a look at which particular addon might cause this or whether this is the result of a combination of those. Other remaining issues can be found at the end of this page.

Day 6 (2017-11-20)

https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx#suggested-ui-tweaks

Day 8 (2017-11-22)

Foxy Gestures -> Gesturefy
It has Rocker gestures (and allows configuring the mouse button to press).

Saka Key -> Vimium-FF
Respects related tab openings (for TST trees). Also shows a tooltop for when actions are performed (liky copying to clipboard) and has vomnibar, which works better than Saka by far.

Migration Cheat Sheet

Moving Important Profile Files

Information about files inside profiles: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data

I imported my session via TreeStyleTab and had my bookmarks synced. History and search engines were restored manually by copying places.sqlite and search.json.mozlz4 respectively. I didn't care about any of the other files.

I will probably defragment places.sqlite in the near future using a tool named profile-cleaner, considering this hasn't happened in years. Details can be found on the Archwiki page.

Add-ons

I will list every add-on that involved more migration than "reinstall this and change a couple settings" below, or those I didn't find replacements for. All other addons were either trivial to migrate or I stopped using them and didn't consider them useful anymore.

In case you cannot view the installed addons on about:addons like me, they are also listed in about:telemetry, albeit with a lot more noise.

Manual Backup and Restore:

  • RedditEnhancementSuite
  • 4Chan-X (userscript)
  • Onee-chan (userscript)

No replacements available for:

  • Menu Wizard

Things Missing or Unsatisfying

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