Bad_Attitude commented about the Starting with a Fresh Profile post. They mentioned that they move their Greasemonkey and Stylish scripts as well. I am not really certain what percentage of Firefox users use Greasemonkey and/or Stylish scripts and didn’t even think about porting those over. I do use many Greasemonkey scripts and may be one or two Stylish scripts. So, I’ve added directions on how to move over your Greasemonkey and/or Stylish scripts.

In the Starting Over section I’ve added a new step which involved installing and using the eCleaner add-on prior to installing new add-ons. Since users are porting over their old prefs.js file, there is going to be a lot of garbage in there left over from active (and even removed) extensions from the prior profile. eCleaner allows you to clear that garbage out, reducing the size of your pref.js file and decreasing Firefox’s start-up time slightly.

In regards to bringing over the extensions folder, I think that is a bad idea. As I said in my reply to Bad_Attitude the reason I suggest a fresh profile is because the user’s current extensions could be causing the performance and stability issues. Plus, with the Add-ons Installation Controls introduced in Firefox 8, upon first run the user is going to need to ‘approve’ the install for every extension they have.

If you are looking to create a fresh profile for testing purposes, the easier way to do that would be with the ProfileManager application. One of the cool things about this application besides an easy way to manage and access multiple Firefox (and Thunderbird) profiles is you can do a one-click ‘copy’ of an existing profile. Since it is making a duplicate of the profile, the ‘extensions’ files that Firefox checks against what is in the ‘extensions’ folder are present, thus the user will not be prompted to ‘approve’ the install of all their extensions they brought over.