{"id":2392,"date":"2012-05-15T09:01:08","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T16:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/?p=2392"},"modified":"2012-05-15T09:01:08","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T16:01:08","slug":"the-new-reset-firefox-feature-is-like-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/2012\/05\/15\/the-new-reset-firefox-feature-is-like-magic\/","title":{"rendered":"The new Reset Firefox feature is like magic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/SSr2u1wMoFg?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Planet Mozilla viewers \u2013 <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/SSr2u1wMoFg\">you can watch this video on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A little more than two years ago when I joined the support team, one of the first things that struck me was that most every support procedure we had involved a long list of troubleshooting steps. The idea seemed to be, let&#8217;s try to identify the exact cause of the problem and just fix that. That sounds reasonable but the practical implication of that often isn&#8217;t:  Is your software up to date? If yes, let&#8217;s turn off your plugins and see what happens. Did the problem go away? No? Does the problem happen in safe mode? If no, let&#8217;s try turning half of your extensions back on. What about a new profile? Great, now just copy places.sqlite from your old profile to your new profile.<\/p>\n<p>What a mess. What mere mortal has the time, skill and patience to work  their way though all that? And if the thing that needs fixing isn&#8217;t easily reproducible? Forget it. It&#8217;s now become a part-time job. I suspect that for many people, it&#8217;s just easier to switch to another browser since you&#8217;ve already got one installed on your computer. Problem solved.<\/p>\n<p>So the support team worked with product and engineering to create the Reset Firefox feature. The first implementation of this is a button on the Troubleshooting Information page (about:support). What is does is create a new profile and migrate your bookmarks, passwords, cookies and form data. Everything else gets set to the defaults. <\/p>\n<p>I have to say, this thing is like magic. You basically get a brand new Firefox installation without the penalty of losing all your data. This is especially useful as a quick fix for the thousands of posts we see on social media where people often express vague complaints about Firefox. &#8220;Firefox is slow.&#8221; &#8220;Firefox crashes too much.&#8221; &#8220;Firefox sucks.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The big gap in the current implementation is that, for the most part, people won&#8217;t know about this feature unless we tell them about it. Future plans involve making it discoverable. Soon we&#8217;ll give users the option to reset Firefox when it crashes on startup for the third time. And the really big thing will be giving Windows users this option when re-installing Firefox. Maybe one day the phrase, &#8220;I tried re-installing Firefox but it didn&#8217;t do anything&#8221; will go away. <\/p>\n<p>Read more about <a href=\"http:\/\/support.mozilla.org\/kb\/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems\">Reset Firefox<\/a> on the support site and then <a href=\"http:\/\/mozilla.org\/beta\">download Firefox Beta<\/a> and try it out.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<strong>Notes:<\/strong> <\/p>\n<li>This may be <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=748047\">broken in Nightly or Aurora<\/a>. Only try this in Beta.<\/li>\n<li>It only saves bookmarks, passwords, cookies and form data. You will lose your add-ons, Sync settings, open tabs and tab groups.<\/li>\n<li>It only works with the default profile. If you&#8217;ve opened Firefox via the command line or shortcut with a profile that isn&#8217;t the default, you won&#8217;t see the Reset Firefox button.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Planet Mozilla viewers \u2013 you can watch this video on YouTube. A little more than two years ago when I joined the support team, one of the first things that &hellip; <a class=\"go\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/2012\/05\/15\/the-new-reset-firefox-feature-is-like-magic\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,117,220],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}