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Comment by madmax108 | Hacker News Reader

For people who are uber concerned about keeping v56 without losing your extensions as part of the 57 update, you can turn off auto update for Firefox:

Go to about:preferences In Firefox Updates choose "Never Check for Updates"

Breathe easy!

I know this is not recommended, but I love my XUL based extensions a little too much (Tab Groups primary among those) to give them up so easily.

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If this is a problem for you, please switch to 52 ESR and use it until June 2018, and file bug reports against those legacy extensions. Disabling updates for a piece of software that is used to run untrusted code is a terrible piece of advice.

Unfortunately, a profile backwards-incompatibility was added in FF55, IIRC, so if you're already on 56 you can't downgrade to 52.

I believe this has something to do with moving favicons out of places.sqlite and into favicons.sqlite. This completely destroyed my favicons (thousands) SeaMonkey's Bookmark Manager (and search history going back years).

A forum thread[1] suggests it may be possible to use the profile refresh functionality to recover most of the profile. Only problem is that it does not preserve extensions or settings.

[1]: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3032457

What does it preserve, then? (Bookmarks? That's the easy thing to restore. Transfer to another browser then transfer back.)

This link should clarify what is preserved by the refresh.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...

If Firefox Sync can sync the important bits of your profile, that may be a sufficient solution to this problem?

TBH, Firefox has made great strides in the last 2 releases (55/56) in terms of pure speed and snappiness, which is why the suggestion to keep the best of both worlds. FFx 52 pales performance-wise in comparison with FFx 56. I understand what you are saying and hope that people (on HN of all places) are smart enough to understand the trade-off being made.

I have (sadly) taken this step.

I'm also saddened that a transition with such a large change in functionality for end users didn't warrant syncing up with a Long Term Support version.

There's going to be a bit of a waiting game to see which extensions get ported and with what percentage of their original functionality retained.

Then it will be decision time.

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