WARNING: Firefox 44 Update Loses Login IDs and Passwords!

Full screen video for YouTube is also a mess

[incrediBILL]

The new Firefox 44 update is a complete disaster.

Woke up Friday morning to a new version of Firefox on my tablet/laptop and all my stored logins and passwords GONE!

I also have SYNC enabled across my desktop, tablet and phone so luckily they still existed on my desktop. Tried to force SYNC to reload my logins, it REFUSED! Waited hours, nothing. Looked into possible update issues and how to resolve it, total waste or time, not the solution. At this point I don't know how or why it failed to import the logins and passwords to FF 44 but sync didn't fix it, nor did any suggestions on how to force a failed import to work.

Went to my desktop and tried to export those logins/passwords and there's no native way to do that in Firefox. Really? Never needed to import/export my logons before since I'm using SYNC on all my devices, which in this case turned out to be 100% USELESS!

So next I installed PASSWORD EXPORTER add-on in my desktop and dumped all the stored passwords then imported them on my tablet/laptop.

Everything is fine, right?

Wrong.

2 days later, today (Sunday) when I go to my desktop FF had installed a new update, FF 44, and now all my logins and passwords were also GONE on my desktop machine!

So this is not an isolated incident, every machine that's upgraded goes POOF!

All my machines are running the latest and greatest version of Win 10 so it's not some old obsolete Win XP or Vista that may have strange interactions, this is a repeatable case of FF 44 update and stored logins vanish.

EXPORT YOUR STORED LOGINS NOW!

Also, full screen Youtub video jitters and jumps like it's on crack or something. When it's not full screen it's just fine and other video players still work properly, just YouTube full screen video is trash.

Just to make sure it wasn't YouTube being a problem, I tried Chrome and Edge running full screen video and it's just fine, only Firefox.

This is probably the worst updat te I've ever seen.

If they don't fix it, might be the end of me using Firefox as I lost a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong with the logins and why it dumped them and sync wouldn't recover them to no avail. At this point, I have no proof sync is even working, I manually forced sync several times, nothing changed, it's useless.

Anyone having the same problem?

[tangor]

Mine is working fine. Then again, I have only three extensions added on and I know a few here run many times that number. Can't say that would be the problem, but more times than not is has been the case that extensions get in the way.

[not2easy]

FF uses a stored profile and a profile.ini file to store that data, maybe you can find the stored profile (in a user folder) and reinstall it? I can't give explicit how to for Windows, but I recently needed to do that to get my info to a new platform install so I know that the instructions for Win are there at Mozilla. It happens often enough that it is one of the FAQs there.

[tangor]

Have you tried the REFRESH FIREFOX to see if your setting will be restored?

Or try: [support.mozilla.org...]

[incrediBILL]

Guys, one machine is an accident or coincident.
Two is a problem.

The only thing I can think of is all the extensions could be causing a problem but this has NEVER happened before. Firefox 44 is the first time EVER and if my cell phone logins get dumped as well, then it will be a complete trifecta.

I was going to blame sync and I still might.

It's possible the new version is blasting my logins because of sync, no clue.

I'm not the only one as I found a bunch of complaints about this exact issue with no resolution that worked for everybody and most didn't work for anybody.

Hope it's fixed by FF 45 or that will be the last version I ever use! LOL

[tangor]

I'm not the best in this scenario in that I don't do that much with Sync, or even own a cell phone. But there's no doubt that if this is, or becomes, a consistent problem FF users will depart in droves.

[toidi]

Another good reason to turn off auto updates.

[engine]

Not happened here, yet. If using sync, I wonder if it has been deleted on one of your other browsers, and that has synchronised across to your desktop machine.

I turned off synch when it screwed up all my bookmarks, so hopefully, that won't be a problem.

I took the precaution of exporting the passwords.

[incrediBILL]

Nope, ALL machines got trashed when 44 installed, logins POOF! wasn't sync as the other machines still had logins. As each machine updates the logins get blasted. Just warning people to export logins just in case as I'm not the only one this is happening to during the latest update.

[jimh009]

Maybe because I'm using a Mac, but I had no problems upgrading to FF 44. Nothing was lost.

[iwrconsultancy]

I could suggest taking a look at Seamonkey. Meant to be an all-in-one suite but you can just use the browser component and ignore the rest. It's based on the same gecko code as FF but is more conventional in its way of working, none of the daft gimmicks or hard-to-find menus of recent FF releases. Uses a separate profile so you can alter the config without affecting FF.

[seamonkey-project.org...]

[bill]

Doesn't the SeaMonkey browser use Sync too? If this is a Sync issue then the problem is likely to spread.

The Security 101 guy in me is screaming, "Never use your browser to store logins and passwords!" It may be convenient, but it's not incredibly secure. Get a password manager and use its plug-in to share the account information around your system.

[Robert Charlton]

I was just about to update to whatever the current version FF is at. Sounds like I should export what log-in data I have before I do. I don't keep critical stuff on the browser... but losing what I have loaded would be a pain.

What's the most dependable way to export what's there? The review page of their recommended Password Exporter has two five star raves and one "Does not work at all"... plus iBill's glowing review for whatever he used.

[Robert Charlton]

I think I've found the answer to my question above, which might conceivably be of help to others

Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles
[support.mozilla.org...]

FF help files on this topic are organized on the hyperlink-hell principle, where it takes 3 or 4 clicks of useless navigation to get to one that actually has any content.

For other info stored on FF, with filenames so they can all be backed up, also see...

Recovering important data from an old profile
[support.mozilla.org...]

sync

Sync, sank, sunk?
:(