XYMer's Home away from Home

I am running Tiger on our MBP and will continue to as long as possible. (Our iMac runs Snow Leopard; but I don't want to go there on the MBP and don't want to go to Lion on any machine, thank you very much)

I fear the end is in sight for Firefox 3.6x

With BDA's help and testing it looks like I can use the G5 option of TFF on our Intel MBP.

My question, is it OK to go directly from Ff 3.6.25 to the current version of TFF or do I need to install TFF incrementally from the earlier versions? I recall reading something on the TFF FAQ's about old Ff profiles (pre 3.6x) screwing up TFF but don't know if I going to the current version of TFF from 3.6 will cause any issues.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

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Mrs H

Welcome aboard Mrs H !

I'll check when I get home, but I'm thinking I have FF3.x & TFF both running, (one at a time of course), on the same Mac.

http://code.google.com/p/tenfourfox/wiki/AAATheFAQ

I think you can go directly to TFF8. But first make a backup copy of your Firefox Profiles folder located in ~/Library/Application Support to use in case you want to revert to 3.6, since TFF will alter that folder. Then move the copy out somewhere for safe keeping. If you don't keep both you should move the 3.6 out of Applications, so you don't inadvertently open it with the Profiles folder now modified for TFF.

OK, testing on iMac/2.4/24"/6GB/10.5.8...

I was able to run one at a time...

FF 2.0.0.20
FF3.5
FF5.3.1.1
TFFG3 8.0
TFFG4/7400/8.0
TFFG4/7450/8.0
TFFG5/5.1

Switched back & forth after quitting each, didn't have a problem!???

I have read what WZZZ talks about, & since I abhor following directions & like to break things, I doubt I ever did the keeping settings separate thing!

Though W offers great advice & likely knows more than I do!

TFFG3 was fast, though TFFG4/7450 seemed faster with less CPU usage & TFFG4/7400 was perhaps a might bit faster, TFFG5.5.0 was really a hog in comparison, but as soon as you send me a 48 Core iMac with 64 PetaBytes of SSD storage... I'll download TFFG5/8.0!

Hi WZZZ,

Thanks for chiming in here.
And, thanks for the quotes from the FAQs - that's part of what I was wondering about.

Saving a separate profile makes sense - I did that when I went from Ff 3.6 to 7 and then 8 on the iMac; but even though I put the profile in a separate place, Ff found it and knew it was there and did funny things til I deleted the second profile and then it stopped telling me it was going to check compatibility every time I opened Ff.

I'm glad to hear you think I can go directly to 8 from Ff3. And yes, I know it's not supported, but at least if it works - and it should - it will provide security updates for me running Tiger when/if Ff3 hits end of life.

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Mrs H

Running only one at a time is what the TFF dev team says to do - BUT, did you go directly from an install of Ff3.6 to an install of TFF8? That's what I'd like to do (saves time) - but don't know if I need to install all the intervening versions of TFF to work my way up from 3 to 8 (yes I know TFF and Ff are not the same) WZZZ seems to think it'll be OK to do so.

I know it's not supported, but it's my best option I think to keep Tiger on the MBP uptodate with security updates.

As far as being a hog, do you think that'll be a problem on my Core 2 duo Intel MBP? The FAQ indicates that it's slow, but mostly on startup - Mr H will just have to wait a bit to begin his work, but at least it'll be safer, I'm hoping.

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Mrs H

BUT, did you go directly from an install of Ff3.6 to an install of TFF8?[quote][/quote]

Directly yes, but the only 3 version I had was 3.1.1

I don't think you need to install them in order, however you should make a back up your profile before installing in case the profile gets corrupted during the upgrade.

Your profile lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Profiles - just make a copy of the folder to another location.

I had to make a new profile when going from 3.6 to 4.0 and that (new as of 4) profile wouldn't survive going from 7.0 to 8.0, but I suspect the 7.0 to 8.0 problem was unique to my G4 (7447A procs w/o open firmware patches).

Of course the only thing I needed to create a new profile was my bookmarks file, but if you've got accounts/passwords stored in your 3.6 profile it gets more complicated...

Just to avoid any confusion -- I left this out too, above -- should be ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles (the ~ means your User/Home Folder.)

To make a copy, you can simply option-click on the Profiles folder (you will see a + inside a little green circle), drag it to the Desktop or some place for safe-keeping, then release the option key.

I recently went directly from 3.6.24 or 25 to TFF8.0, which I found, at least on my old G3, is using less CPU and faster.

Crud. I actually drilled down to make sure I was giving instructions for the right folder too!

You'd think on an extended weekend I'd be able to sleep in more, not less, often. I miss living a couple hundred miles away so I didn't have to "get involved" in the family activities every time.

Sounds like it'll work on our Tiger MBP then, without having to do all the updates in between.

Thanks, as always, for running a test for me,

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Mrs H

Thanks MonkeyBoy,

I too only have bookmarks in the profile file - no accounts/passwords stored; so it should be easy.
Read below, however, about a glitch I ran into in doing a profile copy and save when going from Ff 3 to Ff 7.

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Mrs H

Thanks WZZZ,

Everyone seems to agree - this should work!

I remember reading that Ff 7 would be faster and use less CPU than Ff 6, in fact that's why I waited on the iMac to go directly from v3 to v7 by-passing in intervening versions. And Ff 7 is fast and so is 8.

See my post below on the profile thingie.

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Mrs H

About copying profiles and running two version, I'm copying this which I wrote on the Apple site about what happened when I updated from Ff3 to Ff7 as a caveat.

Related, but not on this subject exactly : I first installed Ff 7.0.1 as a test on one of my backup HDs for the iMac.  Seems quite zippy, but it checks compatibility of add-ons each time it opens. I think that's because the HD has another Ff version on in - I'm not so stupid as to be running the 2 versions at the same time and I'm hoping once I overwrite/update Ff 3.6.23 with Ff 7x that'll clear up and stop happening - I have made several copies of my bookmarks just in case.  I don't want to go to the trouble of creating a second profiles* for just the short time I'm having 2 versions running.

Once I installed Ff7.0.1 on the iMac and put 3.6.23 in a separate folder to isolate it just in case I wanted to revert, the annoying checking compatibility of add-ons stopped.

*creating a second profiles (I think) is not the same as just making a backup/duplicate copy of the original. If it is the same, then I did just that by duplicating the folder, but - and again I read this somewhere buy can't retrace my steps - I recall there was more to it than just that...

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Mrs H

If you launch the old version of Firefox, the next time the new version starts it will perform a compatibility check. If you quit FF 7 and immediately load FF 7 it shouldn't pop up the compatibility check. If it does, that probably means there's some corruption in the profile.

To create a 2nd profile you have to use the profile manager. You can then copy the contents of your backed up folder into this new profile's folder to create a 2nd profile, however you'll have to use the profile manager to switch between profiles. My FF is still setup to prompt me at startup to choose which profile to use, which saved me a lot of head scratching (I never can remember how to make the profile manager open) when the 7 to 8 upgrade fried my profile.

Man, I sat there trying to edit that last response off and on since literally seconds after I submitted, only to have the site timeout repeatedly.

Same here on the timeouts. I'm new here and I thought that was just the way things were - glad to see they shouldn't be this way.

Sooooo - the compatibility checks did stop with Ff7, but I think it was because it was what I did as described above.

As far as on my MBP with Ff3 and then installing TFF 8(?) - is it enough to just copy the profile and save the copy and assume I'm going to use TFF or is the profile manager thing you describe what I'll have to do? This is all on Mr H's MBP (I use the iMac with 10.6) and I don't want to saddle him with any annoyances and computer things that get in his way of work.

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Mrs H

The backup is just in case the profile upgrade goes wrong and you have severe problems after upgrading. I think when I did my 8 upgrade Firefox would literally hang and never open, at which point 7 did the same thing too, meaning the profile was b0rked. You don't need to mess with the profile manager unless you want to run multiple profiles for testing purposes or whatever - I'd just make a copy of the profile's folder and never mess with the profile manager. To restore the original profile delete the current profile folder and rename your copy.

Sorry, I rambled on about profiles a little long because I need to get rid of my multiple profiles and go back to a single profile, sometimes if I type things out I'll actually remember to do it when I get home. Finally finished migrating over to my G5 this weekend, so there's a bunch of little things to do that have been in a holding pattern for way too long.

When I created my 2nd profile I first went into old FF and exported my bookmarks to an HTML file, then imported that into my new profile. Technically you could also dig into the old profile and copy the bookmarks related stuff out of it, but I wanted to do a "clean" import, since it's usually a little bit of a mystery where the actual corruption in the profile is at.

x704 has actually never been this bad, at least in my experience, so something's probably gone wrong. Hopefully Anonymous has the time to fix it. Or maybe a bunch of spammers are trying to brute-force their way through verification.

To what are you referring?

- Anonymous

There was a ~2 hour period where most of the time when I hit submit, and half the time when I hit refresh, the site was unresponsive. The few times I got a reply in was by copying the response, hitting refresh on the page every so many minutes, pasting in the reply text, hitting submit, and hoping that it'd go through. If not, back, refresh, wait for site to respond, and repeat. Seemed to go away shortly after I made that last response though.

Basically the response I made at 12:10 EST I tried submitting my edit off and on for nearly 30 minutes, then the subsequent responses in this thread got tied up interminably. Had me wondering if it was something with the Netscreen router, so I tried hitting it from one of the Comcast lines and the site wouldn't pull up from there either. Veddy odd!

I had similar experiences. I had several times when nothing would load and others when the load times were very slow. But it seems back to normal now.

Whew then it's not just a strange monkey-fueled portal of unresponsive websites then.

It smelled like a DoS was in progress, or at least a scripted effort to hack/syn flood/etc. Lots of timeouts, but when it responded access was instantaneous.

Could have been an attack on a server in or a distributed attack from the data center x704.net lives in or a similar temporary phenomenon.

Supposedly lots of cyber attacks on this cyber monday.

i was on a g5 tower today i put TFF 7 on, and was surprised the program itself told me TFF 8 was available! i think in total i have it on 3 old machines. on the one that should get used the most, the users (grad students) dug up safari and put it in the dock again... that was really my best real world test case.

to the OP Mrs H., i don't know what your reasons for 10.4 are, but you should upgrade to 10.6/chrome already! this is 2011 (almost '12) if you have to have 10.4 you could still create a partition and dual boot to it when you need to. just my 2 cents

I'm considering switching hosting services for other reasons, but doing so might also alleviate this little blips.

- Anonymous

Uhm, what is TFF? (G5 user here)