Updated to Firefox 3 today – loving it so far. But, I have had a major problem!
I lost my saved passwords upon updating to Firefox 3! You can check to see if your passwords imported into Firefox 3 by going to Tools > Options > Security > Saved Passwords.
However, a little tinkering, and I have my saved passwords in Firefox 3!
Here’s how:
- Go to your Firefox Profile Folder. You can find your profile folder in Windows by navigating to %APPDATA%/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
- Now look for the file called signons2
- Open with any text editor, highlight and copy all of the data, then close the file.
- Now look for the file called signons3
- Open with any text editor, highlight and then paste the data from signons2
- Close the file (Don’t forget to save!)
- Now restart Firefox … and your passwords are now updated to your Firefox 3 installation!
PDF 
Well tinkered. Thanks!!
Great informative piece and congrats on getting linked to from LifeHacker here:
http://lifehacker.com/396431/transfer-your-firefox-2-passwords-into-firefox-3
AskTheAdmin | Karl Gechlik’s last blog post: Using group policy to map network drives.
Mine passed over just fine without needing this… As did my bookmarks..
Nice trick, while moving from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 I had used the password Exporter plugin which made my life much easier.
or you could just use vidoop (www.vidoop.com) and have your passwords wherever, whenever
THANKX THANX THANX FOR EXPLAINING – B.t.w. I like that download day icon..
Just so you know.. I tried this and it didn’t work.. you needed to copy the key3.db as well as the signons2.txt in order for it to work.
Simply copy the key3.db and signons2.txt to your new directory and then rename the signons2.txt to signons3.txt.
That worked for me anyhow.
I know some people had no problems moving over, which is great. Perhaps next time, I won’t have any problems, either!
@lencurrie – I didn’t have to copy any other files. I am glad you were able to get it to work, though! How do you like Fx3 so far? I left signons2.txt as its own file in case I decided to downgrade to Fx2 in the future; therefore, the file would still be available for use.
@MisterXYZ – The download day icon came from GetFirefox.com. They have a whole collection of really sweet graphics over there!
Thank you so much for this tip!
this is great!, before this I don’t want to update my Firefox because of afraid losing the password. thanks again.
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do you know how to recover lost text? i was typing a letter to my ex on a blog and it took about 4 hours and somehow my page went back and now i cant pull it up
Hmmm, sometimes websites will time out after a period of inactivity – even if you are typing in boxes. I suggest that if you are going to write a long message, type in Notepad, then copy and paste into the web forms. I’m sorry you lost your letter!
God! Thank you so much for this! I’ve been having this problem ever since Firefox 3 launched so I had to keep going back to Firefox 2 for this reason, but eventually Firefox 2 started having lots of issues and I had to ultimately upgrade to version 3, but this kept happening and it was driving me nuts! Thanks so much, it’s been finally solved!