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Some time back, I wrote a post listing the steps required to migrate passwords stored in Chrome to Firefox

That post was a bit convoluted, so this post is hopefully an improvement!  My intention is to make this process as simple, and reliable, as possible.  To succeed, you will need:

There are five main steps.  Let’s get started!

  1. In Chrome’s address bar, paste:
    chrome://flags/#password-import-export

    …then hit enter.

    Chrome flag screenshot
    The option in Chrome should appear like this. Enable it!

    In the option that is highlighted, Select Enabled and then Relaunch.

  2. Now, in Chrome, navigate to chrome://settings-frame/passwords, scroll down and click Export.  Save the file with a .csv extension.
  3. Locate the CSV file and right click > Open With > LibreOffice Calc (Alternatively, start LibreOffice Calc and open the CSV file).
  4. Using LibreOffice Calc, you will need to modify the CSV file to import it into Firefox.  Do the following:
    1. Right-click on row 1 and select ‘Insert Rows Above’.  This should insert a single row at the top of the sheet.
    2. Copy the following and paste into cell A1, using Shift-Ctrl-V (to ensure you paste as plain text):
      # Generated by Password Exporter; Export format 1.0.4; Encrypted: false
    3. You need to move one column, B, to where column D is – but we don’t want to overwrite your data!
      • At the top of column B, right-click and select Cut.
      • Then right-click again and select Delete Columns – this should remove the now-empty column, and shift-left columns C and D, to positions B and C.
      • Now, on column D, select Paste.  Your url data should now live in column D.
    4. Paste the following into cell A2, using Shift-Ctrl-V:
      hostname username password formSubmitURL httpRealm usernameField passwordField

      When pasting, you may be prompted to select the data format.  Select “Unformatted Text” in the list and click OK.  We are ok with overwriting other cell contents, so “OK” that.  Note, you may need to separate out the headings into columns, left to right.

    5. Finally, we’re ready to export this data!  Go to the File menu, select Save As…In the Save As requester that appears, at the bottom check ‘Edit Filter’ and select ‘Text CSV (.csv)’ in the format drop-down:

      Select these options to correctly export your data!
      Select these options to correctly export your data!
    6. Before we get too excited, there’s just one more step to perform – some textual clean-up!Open up the exported CSV file in your favourite plain-text editor.  In the first row, you may see this:
      "# Generated by Password Exporter; Export format 1.0.4; Encrypted: false",,,,,,

      Delete the leading ” and trailing “,,,,,, from that line.

      Secondly, do a Find/Replace on double-commas (,,) making them ,””,  (with two quotes inserted) instead.  You may need to perform this Find/Replace twice.  Now save the file again.

  5. In Firefox, click on the burger menu and select Add-ons (or just go to about:addons).  Find Password Exporter and click Preferences.  In the Preferences window, click Import Passwords.  Now locate your saved CSV file and load it.You should finally see something like this:

    Importing saved passwords into Firefox. Not easy, but definitely rewarding!
    Importing saved passwords into Firefox. Not easy, but definitely rewarding!

 

Mozilla Firefox word mark. Guestimated clear s...
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Stupid Firefox 7!  It doesn’t recognise my plug-ins!  But they did work in FF3.5.  What gives?!!!

Ok, perhaps I’m overreacting.  In fact, I am.  Sorry.

I use #CentOS for my daily work which includes the rather antiquated Firefox v3.5.  Ouch.  As a web developer, it’s good to test on legacy browsers but it’s also important to use the latest – so I updated to the latest Firefox (v7, at time of writing).

Because my desktop machine (HP Opteron ML115) has 6GB of RAM, I typically use the x86_64 (64-bit) edition of #Firefox.  However, unlike Firefox v3.5, v7 doesn’t seem to pick up my plug-ins automatically from /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins.

To fix this, I had to open a shell and navigate into my home directory‘s mozilla plugins directory (I didn’t even know this existed until now!).

cd ~/mozilla/plugins
Then, just fix up all the missing symlinks:

ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/* .

No problemo!  They’re now all back again at about:plugins  🙂

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Well, I actually feel the need to thank Microsoft.  Crazy.

But yes, thank the maker that Redmond has finally decided it’s time to end support for IE6.  Who, in the web design world, won’t miss it, I wonder?

Internet Explorer 6 has been the bane of web development inasmuch as IE5.5 before it.  Given its age, though, it could be forgiven.  IE6 was a lot better than IE5.5, which was also a huge improvement over IE5. 

So, now that web designers can concentrate on better serving their customers and perhaps being more profitable too, this surely is a good thing for the industry that has for too long supported an browser incapable of basic standards-support.