Firefox Passwords files OSX vs Linux

I was tying to copy across my Firefox browser data (my bookmarks and saved passwords) from my Linux / Fedora Core 3 laptop to my Mac G5 and ran into a little strangeness with the naming convention used for the password file. Here is what I found:

I was tying to copy across my Firefox browser data (my bookmarks and saved passwords) from my Linux / Fedora Core 3 laptop to my Mac G5 and ran into a little strangeness with the naming convention used for the password file. Here is what I found:

Firstly, locate your Profiles Folder – on the Mac at:

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxx.default

and on Linux at:

~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxxx.default

(where xxxxxx is some random number that your computer will generate) The only files needed are the bookmarks and saved passwords files. Bookmarks are stored in a file that uses the same name on both Mac and Linux and it intuitively called bookmarks.html For Passwords you will need to locate and copy two files on Linux the files are a text file called xxxxxxxx.s and binary database file called key3.db. Now here is the wierdness, on OS X there is no xxxxxx.s file but it is called signons.txt so if you have an existing file signons.txt on your Mac you will need to delete it, copy over the xxxxxxx.s file from linux and the key3.db file then rename xxxxxxx.s to signons.txt.

So in summary:

  • Copy over the files bookmarks.html, key3.db and xxxxxxxx.s from your Linux profile folder to your OS X profile folder.
  • Now rename the xxxxxxx.s file to signons.txt (if it complains about a pre existing one then choose overwrite).

    Surf and Enjoy

    R