Situation
Set up a new workstation. I did not continue the old OS (Windows) installation, but instead started fresh. Now, I want to import the passwords from the old profile into the new one on the new workstation.
I do not know if this would work with FF sync, but I do not want to use FF Sync anyway, especially for transferring passwords.
my Findings:
There are some applications which export passwords from a FF profile DB, like https://github.com/kspearrin/ff-password-exporter . However, there seems to be no straight forward way to import passwords into FF. The documentation by Mozilla I found only talks about replacing files by hand, which would of cause overwrite the passwords of the profile I want to import the passwords to.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile
I found a lot of weird stuff, e.g. there exists a Mozilla help article on this issue named "Password Manager - Remember, delete, change and import saved passwords in Firefox" - but the article unfortunately does not explain how to import passwords, in fact, the word "import" is not used once except for the title.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/password-manager-remember-delete-change-and-import
In Firefox Quantum, the password manager no longer has an "add" button, and the "import" button only offers you to import stuff from other browsers, and you cannot specify an import location manually, it seem like one needs to work with what FF detects at this point. Therefore, one solution is to
- Install a browser which supports importing FF passwords, e.g. Chrome
- Import the FF passwords into Chrome
- Optional steps if the new profile / FF install is on another PC
- Install Chrome on the target PC
- Move the Chrome profile to the target pc
- Use the password manager in FF to import the passwords from Chrome (hopefully it detects the installation, otherwise your are screwed again....)
Questions:
1) Do I miss the obvious solution? 2) Is there any reason why FF supports importing and merging passwords from other browsers but not from a FF profile?