Upgrading Firefox on Debian
2025-07-16 13:37:46 PDT
Bart Massey 2025
So in the previous post here I upgraded my Debian desktop. One of my more foolish choices was to finally tackle upgrading Firefox.
Firefox has been stuck on an ancient version because I pinned Debian
to default to testing and the testing version
of Firefox relied on a library from unstable. (At least I
think that's what I remember. If so, it's an obvious Debian packaging
bug. I may also have just held Firefox, as I use it extensively in my
work and it really mustn't fail for me in a critical situation.)
I installed the missing library manually and upgraded to current testing Firefox. Then the fun started.
My bad workflow, which I am trying consciously to get away from, is to manage my to-do list by keeping Firefox windows open for each of item. Since Firefox tends to gracefully recover these windows on restarts, this works just well enough that it's hard to get away from. It's fairly convenient, at least.
So I carefully bookmarked every window I didn't want to lose, and restarted Firefox. The new Firefox came up and did indeed manage to restore its ancient state. But the UI was pretty broken — even for new windows.
All new Firefox windows came up with the Bookmarks Manager open. This rapidly became unusably annoying. Suggestions from the Interwebs solved nothing.
Worse was the UI scaling, which had become untenable. My vision is
not great, so I need to have the UI font (as opposed to the web page
font) large enough on my big display. (This LG43UK6200PUA TV-as-monitor
is 42.5" 4K — reported by XFCE's Display widget as 75" and by
xrandr as about 11", but that's a story for another day.)
Sadly, everything was out of whack: the UI font was unbelievable tiny.
The Internets could only suggest adjusting Firefox's DPI setting, but
that just produced a whole another set of issues. Icon size to text size
ratios on Firefox have always been terrible: this is especially annoying
for the tab close box, which is a tricky target to hit on this
display.
So… to make a several-hours-long story short, I finally gave up. I
moved my whole ~/.mozilla folder aside and restarted
Firefox. As expected, things worked OK now out of the box. I used
Mozilla Sync to recover most of what I'd lost. The notable exception
was, again as expected, my session: Mozilla Sync claims to save and
restore it, but it just didn't. Good thing I bookmarked everything way
back up there.
Bowser cookies and favicons were also lost in all this, so now I'm logging into all my sites fresh again. I'm not sure I wanted either of these synced and restored (especially cookies) but it sure would have been convenient here.
I'll have to figure out what to do about the alternate Firefox Profiles I had in my old setup. I am afraid to just move them over, for pretty obvious reasons. I'll probably just try to recreate the couple I care about; more adventures await.
As a novice Linux user with no particular bond to Firefox and no particular experience dealing with its vagaries, the solution would have been relatively simple: I could have switched back to Chrome, from whence I came a year or two ago.
The switch to Firefox was motivated primarily by Google's attempt to restrict ad-blockers: I rely on mine for the web, and honestly would use a lot less of the web without it. I occasionally encounter the non-ad-blocked experience elsewhere and am kind of stunned: you have to literally mine the nuggets of information out of a pile of intrusive and noxious advertising. How does anyone live with that?
Anyhow, maybe this will help someone, and the whining felt good. I'm back to a functional place with Firefox, and that's all I needed. I just wish it had been easy and seamless.