Mozilla Firefox Adds Support for Importing Settings from Other BrowsersThursday March 4th, 2004Ben Goodger writes: "Profile migration is now available in Firefox nightly builds, and Firefox's profile data folder has changed names from 'Phoenix' to 'Firefox'. "People obtaining nightly builds after today will be greeted with the new migration UI when they launch the build as it copies profile data from the Phoenix folder to the Firefox folder. To import from other sources, such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Seamonkey/Netscape 7 etc. once the browser is running, choose File->Import... "Currently the migration system is pretty much complete on Windows, and is very comprehensive. Mac OS X supports migrating from Seamonkey/Netscape 4, but bugs remain in Opera import and I have yet to write importers for Safari, Mac IE etc. These will come online in the coming weeks. Similarly on Linux we can only import from Seamonkey/Netscape 4/Opera... eventually we will also import from Konqueror, Galeon, Epiphany. "For more details about the profile data folder name changing, please see the MozillaZine forums post." This is probably the best Fire(fox|bird|whatever) news I have ever seen. This should make it much easier for SeaMonkey users to try out FireFox without having to go through reconfiguring everything to their preferred values. *cue nerds complaining about the change in the folder name of "Phoenix" to "Firebird"* s/bird/fox/ ;-) As for the news, great! Hopefully it'll help with evangelizing Firefox. It's really too bad that this isn't particularly useful for many of the people who'll read this as they've already switched or can do so easily without automigration. (Well, except for between releases, but that's still a little ways off...) This will probably introduce a bunch of bugs to be followed or fixed. I have no idea why no one wants to keep the name Phoenix. I still prefer the name "Mozilla Phoenix" on any other name. I suggest that users going thru the "custom" installation should be prompted to change/choose the name of the application (browser). That would be very nice. Can you imagine launching "Britney" whenever you feel like doing so? ;) first off al... you do know why they can't call it phoenix right ? (lawsuit etc ) Second: use Firesomething to modify the application's name: http://www.cosmicat.com/software/firesomething/ I doubt it will change the profile folder, but oh well, can't be arsed by that ;) This will probably introduce a bunch of bugs to be followed or fixed. I have no idea why no one wants to keep the name Phoenix. I still prefer the name "Mozilla Phoenix" on any other name. I suggest that users going thru the "custom" installation should be prompted to change/choose the name of the application (browser). That would be very nice. Can you imagine launching "Britney" whenever you feel like doing so? ;) Sorry for the double post. I just reloaded the page and there it was! I hope that my request for custome naming will be counted twice :) I just posted some questions and suggestions about the new profile name / migration / import features in the forum. Here's the direct link: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=416148#416148 Ben rocks. Old Firefox mission: kick ass. Mission accomplished. Current Firefox mission: kick IE's ass. This is a big step toward accomplishment of the mission. The mozillazine article seems it might be incorrect. the forum post says "Mozilla Firebird can import from only one source." "You could delete your profile, (but not the files!) and ..import again." Don't we want to at least backup the other profiles to another location, or merge the bookmark files or something if it is not possible to migrate multiple profiles? --Sam |