The Site With the Lamp

July 14, 2007

I belatedly updated to Firefox 2.0.0.4 and lost all my saved passwords without a pause. The password file (signon2.txt (curious; it should be signon.txt)), the key3.db file and the cert8.db file were all there but the password were not being filled in and the show password dialog was completely blank. In spite of this the bookmarks were showing up correctly.

The first thing to do in a situation like this is to take a bakup. Then I typed in 'about:config' into the browser and changed the signon.SignOnFileName to signon2.txt still no dice.

The next thing to do is to create new profile and copy the files from your old profile into the new folder. In case you have never had to create a new profile before; you need to start firefox from the command line using the -ProfileManager parameter. So did it work? not exactly but we are on the right track.

Immidiately after starting with the new profile, this error was generated:

I wouldn't have seen that error if I had not been working in the command line. So that's a lession for GUI addicts. Such a property does show up in 'about:config'. I reset the property and restarted the browser. Hey presto, the passwords do show up. Then I closed the dialog and opened it again only to find the passwords have once again disappeared. I don't recall seeing the name of Hudini on the developers list. Never mind.

Along with the entries in the passwords dialog the signon.txt file (I renamed it back from signon2.txt) has disappeared too. Good thing I bothered to take a back up. I repeated the process only to see the same result. Then I thought to try to export the passwords and try to work with that. Fortunately there is a Firefox extension just for that.

Installing and extension involes a restart so the password file had to be restored again. But yes, the passwords can be exported using this extension. And they can be imported right back into the default profile. Normal service has been restored.