A fresh Firefox for the new year

Testing the Firefox we ship, not the Firefox you created

Happy new year! It’s time for a fresh start. One area where you can help us improve Firefox 4 — if you run the beta or nightly build, which you should! — is to make sure you are using the product that our users are actually encountering when they download it.

Right now, whether you remember it or not, you are probably carrying around a lot of preferences and settings that were set sometime during Firefox 1.x, 2.x or 3.x — either by yourself or by an add-on or upgrade step. This means that your experience is probably very different from that of a new user. I took a look at my own preferences, and was surprised to see the amount of non-standard prefs I have set, even though I try to keep my browser as stock as possible.

With Firefox Sync, it’s easier than ever to keep your bookmarks and passwords/form data, but reset your preferences so that you are running a vanilla Firefox 4.

The basic process is:

1. Set up Firefox Sync if you haven’t already.
2. Go to Preferences → Sync → Manage Account → My Sync Key and record your Sync Key and make sure you remember your login details from the Sync preferences.
3. Quit Firefox, and start it with the profile manager
4. Create a new profile
5. Open the Sync preference pane in the new, blank profile.
6. Click “Set up Sync.”
7. Since you already have an account, click “Connect”
8. Click “Sync Options” and uncheck “Preferences” from the list of things to sync. Click “Done.”
9. Click “I don’t have the device with me” to be able to enter Synk Key and username/password manually. Click “Continue” when you have entered the details.

You will now have a fresh, shiny Firefox 4 — but with your bookmarks and stored passwords present. It'll take a minute or two before everything is synchronized, depending on how much data you have — so give it a little time to populate your new profile.

Note that add-ons aren’t synced — but it might be a good time to take stock of what add-ons you really are using anyway, and re-install them when you really miss them.

You can also revert to your old profile at any point by selecting it from the Profile Manager — we aren’t deleting anything, just creating a new profile.

Running with this setup for a while will help you find default preferences that aren’t optimal, and see which ones we have fixed. Do we still lose your form data if you’re on HTTPS and your browser crashes? No. Do we still let JavaScript resize the main browser window? Yes. & cetera.

I’m sure you’ll have a couple of epiphanies during the first day or so, and don’t forget to file bugs when you find settings that have an annoying or unreasonable default setting!