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Our workplace is getting new laptops in a month and they will need their bookmarks transferred to the new laptops. We don't do roaming profiles for them (they use one laptop on our domain). I am looking for a way to gracefully copy the files to the new laptops with ideally no physical intervention on our part.

We are moving from XP to W7, so I've done my reading on the differences between the Windows profiles on XP versus their setup in W7.

We're currently using on Firefox 10.0.2, though that may change by the time we move stuff over (depending on Firefox's release cycle).

The hiccup I am encountering is that Firefox creates a profile folder with (random_gibberish.Default) as the folder name. So it's hard to automate where to copy from and especially where to copy to (as you don't know what profile name Firefox will come up with). I can easily automate running firefox for the first time, but the it's a guess to what the beginning of the folder name will start with. If you use a CLI switch for Firefox to create a (firefox) profile, it still creates something named randomgibberish.profilename

I've found some Firefox CLI stuff, but that is less than helpful as anything remotely close to what I need loads a GUI of some sort (i.e. firefox.exe -migration). As I said, we don't want to have to babysit 100 laptops while bookmarks are being moved.

Not interested in installing 3rd-party apps (security reasons). Want to take care of this with CLI and/or scripting if necessary. We are using Zenworks, so I have the opportunity for a little scripting and bundle-building in there. Since the users' machines won't have python installed, unfortunately, I can't use python.

I've been searching online for this solution for half a day, and all I get are answers for non-enterprise, or suggestions of "download this and install it". I need an enterprise solution, not a user solution.

Surely someone has attacked this on their own? Any suggestions I haven't looked into yet? (and fer crying out loud, why doesn't firefox have -importbookmark and -exportbookmark switches??? or am I missing something???)

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For the "where from" part, have you considered extracting this information from the profile.ini file in the Firefox profile directory? The line with "Path=gibberish.default" will tell you where from.

As to the "where to", you can pick the name yourself. Copy the files over to a folder named anynameyouwant.default and then dump a profile.ini like this one:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=0

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=anynameyouwant.default
Default=1

Be wary of users who may have multiple profiles of course.

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  • Ah! Thanks for sending me in that direction... I had totally missed the .ini file (I just found profiles.ini in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox)
    – uniquegeek
    May 24, 2012 at 15:10
  • Hmmm, tried deleting the profile directory I had on my own w7 machine and editing profile.ini to have a new path. Firefox wouldn't load. Tried removing the profiles with firefox -ProfileManager. It removed the ffx profile directories and only had "[General] StartWithLastProfile=1" in the profile.ini. It started then. Tried a profile name that had eightcharacters.Default, that didn't work... will have to try your method on a new/vanilla firefox install... or just revert to extracting what the gibberish part is.
    – uniquegeek
    May 24, 2012 at 15:48
  • You still have to point the profile.ini to a valid profile location. A valid profile is one that the -ProfileManager creates.
    – chutz
    May 26, 2012 at 4:48

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