me: [painstakingly copies entire .firefox folder from other machine]
Firefox: Hi, welcome to your new setup! Wanna import settings from somewhere?
me: Uh, you don't see the ones that are already there? Then ok, I guess so... import, plz.
Firefox: No programs that contain bookmarks, history or password data could be found.
Me: You didn't exactly ask me where to look for them. How about asking? Cuz all the data is literally in your profile folder right now.
This always happens. I think it's probably part of the scam to get everyone to sign up for Firefox Sync, which I refuse to use on principle since they now force you to connect to their server instead of allowing 3rd-party servers.
@bthylafh Afterthought: does it not like the folder being a link? I'd have been suspicious of that, except that's the way I have it set up on the source machine too, with no problems.
@woozle Could be. I don't ever make it a link. My process is (on Windows) copying %APPDATA%\Mozilla to the new user folder in the same position and Firefox finds it every time. This method preserves the random profile folder names as well.
@bthylafh I finally got it to load properly by manually editing installs.ini to point at my preferred profile.
I think my original gripes still apply.
@woozle My profiles.ini file includes IsRelative=1 and Path=xxxxxxx.name-xxxxzz lines. Did yours, before you edited it?
@bthylafh I edited installs.ini, not profiles.ini.
FWIW, profiles.ini looks like this on both systems now:
[Install4F96D1932A9F858E]
Default=woozle.main.session
Locked=1
[Profile1]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=woozle.main.session
Default=1
[Profile0]
Name=default-release
IsRelative=1
Path=t00eyu7p.default-release
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=0
Version=2
@bthylafh What other step can there be?