Some known issues when upgrading to Pale Moon 27

Frequently Asked Questions about the Pale Moon browser and their answers.
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Moonchild
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Some known issues when upgrading to Pale Moon 27

Unread post by Moonchild » 2016-11-24, 01:00

There are some known issues when upgrading to Pale Moon 27 from an earlier version of Pale Moon.
These issues usually have to do with using an older or Firefox-migrated user profile. This FAQ entry lists the most common ones you might run into, and steps to resolve them:

Please note also that, if reverting back to 26.5 for any reason, you will lose some per-site stored information because of the profile migrations that happen with the upgrade (they are one-way).

Tab contents don't want to load after upgrading to v27

Note: this particular issue should be solved by 27.0.3.
One of the things changed in v27 is how sessions are stored. This can, in some cases, not migrate over well, causing an issue with tab contents not restoring properly.
In case your tab contents of restored tabs don't want to load after you upgrade to Pale Moon 27, here are a few things you may want to try:
  • Simply try exiting and restarting your browser again -- especially some extensions may cause a problem there because the storage format has changed.
  • If that doesn't work, you may have to reset your session storage:
    1. Right-click a tab and select "bookmark all tabs"
    2. Put it in a temporary folder, e.g. "My Session"
    3. Go to Options, set the setting in general "when Pale Moon starts" to "Show my home page"
    4. Restart the browser.
    5. Go to your bookmarks, right-click on the e.g. "My Session" folder, and select "restore all in tabs"
    6. Go to Options, set the setting in general "when Pale Moon starts" back to "Show my windows and tabs from last time"
    That should fully reset the session storage content and fix this quirk.
  • If you continue to have an issue with your profile, you can also try a full profile reset after this upgrade: Go to Help -> Troubleshooting Information, and select the profile reset option in the top-right of the page there, or start Pale Moon from the command-line with "--reset-profile".
Saved passwords missing

If you run into the issue that (some) saved passwords seem to be missing or have reverted to older versions, then this is because of a previous migration/copy of (files from) a Firefox profile (some extensions or external tools may also have caused this).
If you have previously copied a (newer) Firefox profile to Pale Moon that already uses the new password storage format, and this was previously converted from the older format, then it's possible that Pale Moon 27 will not convert your stored passwords properly (because a new storage file already exists, and the "already converted" preference has been set).

To solve this, try:
  1. Type "about:config" in the address bar and press enter
  2. Find the preference "signon.importedFromSqlite", right-click it, and choose "Reset"
  3. Click on Pale Moon > Help > Troubleshooting Information > (Under profile) Show Folder
    This opens an explorer/file manager window in your profile folder
  4. Close Pale Moon (Important!) -- keep the explorer/file manager window open
  5. Delete "logins.json"
  6. Restart Pale Moon. It will now create a new .json file with logins from the previous (sqlite) format.
Note: Some extensions (e.g. X-Notifier) may interfere if they immediately write to the password store when the browser starts. If the above method doesn't work to recover the passwords, then disable your extensions first and try again.

The browser doesn't start after upgrading (language pack)

The browser doesn't start, and gives a (non-English) message about an XML parsing error in a small window.
This is because you had installed a language pack, and either disabled extension compatibility checking or (less likely) had a problem with the upgrade process.
V26 language packs are not compatible with V27, and will prevent the browser from starting.

To recover from this situation:
  1. Start Pale Moon while pressing and holding down the SHIFT key on your keyboard
    (alternatively, start Pale Moon with "-safe-mode" from the command-line)
  2. In the recovery options dialog, check "Reset all user preferences to Pale Moon defaults"
    (This will reset your choice of locale to English)
  3. Click "Make Changes and Restart"
Last edited by Moonchild on 2016-12-17, 11:43, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: First point solved, extensions may interfere with password recovery.
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