I've just accidentally downgraded my profile to 4.0 and borked it.

[jobbautista9]

I was looking at ancient versions of Pale Moon to look for some differences I'm finding compared to the current version, and I just accidentally forgot to ensure the profile manager to be opened first. Very unluckily this was in 4.0 when Pale Moon started using a different directory from Firefox for the profiles, resulting in my default profile getting opened and downgraded... The profile no longer opened in the current version, which I assume is due to the profile no longer having a working NSS credential store in SQLite and the browser just crashes when it can't look for one. Fortunately I was able to salvage it and make it work again by putting the profile in 28.17.0 (which as documented in the profile migration documentation is the last version to support migrating the NSS credential stores from DBM to SQLite). Now it opens in 33.9.1.

My profile seems to work fine. My selected theme got reset which I quickly fixed back to Moonscape (and it's due to this accident I noticed that my lightweight theme's URL for its image no longer works, which I also fixed). Remarkably my history (browsing, search and forms) and bookmarks (including the live bookmarks) are intact. I've lost no add-ons nor their settings. Site preferences still seem the same. My userscripts and userstyles are also fine. All of the toolbar buttons are where they should be except for uBlock Origin (which has always removed itself from its toolbar anyway) and RecordRewind (which moved itself to the Navigation Toolbar). My Mojeek got pushed to the bottom of the search engines which I've quickly moved back to the top but other than that I kept all of my search plugins. I'm still synced to my sync account (which I worried might've broken because 4.0 showed that the Sync is not setup).

Really the only things I've lost are my cookies, which funnily enough happened to me one time randomly before even though I haven't really done anything to my profile or cleared my cookies (so I think my profile might've already gotten its gremlins before this incident). And even then I'm still logged in to my SNSes that don't use cookies for storing logins, like Pleroma and Bluesky... My logins in SubWebView are also safe, thanks to being contained in its own subdirectory. Saved passwords are also intact, though I'm not sure if it's due to Sync or if they really didn't get touched by the migration.

So I wonder how screwed I really am...

[Moonchild]

So I wonder how screwed I really am...

Really hard to tell. It's likely that 4.0 simply wasn't aware of data storage locations from modern Pale Moon, so it just wouldn't have touched them. Being in a broken state likely also prevented damage by not being able to initialize.
So, I'm thinking damage is probably limited

[jobbautista9]

I see... What about the migration to 28.17.0 though? Or is it that version 33 vs 28.17.0-32.5.2 (except 30.x) are all very closely similar platform-wise anyway (i.e. they're all UXP and using SQLite for NSS), compared to say 28 vs 27 (UXP vs Tycho), that damage in that front would be limited too?

[Moonchild]

Maybe someone with more time can dive into those questions. As it is, i have stuff to unpack and set up at my new place but bad timing of bad timings I'm now ill with a nasty cold, so not having any sort of reasonable head space.

[jarsealer]

My selected theme got reset which I quickly fixed back to Moonscape (and it's due to this accident I noticed that my lightweight theme's URL for its image no longer works, which I also fixed).

I thought lightweight themes were stored/saved by the browser, is it downloaded every time you open PM?

[jobbautista9]

I'm not sure about lightweight themes applied normally, but for LW themes applied by the ThemeTool extension I'm pretty sure it's cached, and I guess the cache got lost after it got disabled by the 4.0 downgrade...

[jarsealer]

I tested this and saw in my firewall that when using the ThemeTool extension it connects to addons.palemoon.org and loads the LW themes. Same thing when applying LW themes normally from Add-ons manager.

[Moonchild]

Lightweight themes are a bit of an oddity. They are inherently online themes but get the active one persistently cached. So they may seem offline like full themes but they are not.

[jarsealer]

Lightweight themes are a bit of an oddity. They are inherently online themes but get the active one persistently cached. So they may seem offline like full themes but they are not.

I don't see why they have to be fetched online if all of them can be stored offline or cached, unless for updates. Maybe it's a technical limitation?

Also more of lightweight themes would be nice to see some day, I'd make one myself but can't code, or can you use ones other than on the official add-ons store?

[Moonchild]

lightweight themes are just 2 images and a small set of color definitions for text. They don't technically have to be stored online but they were designed from the ground up as customization-as-a-service. making new ones is easy as anything. just make a proper format set of images and define a few variables in a text file.

[moonbat]

Can one create a light theme with a file: URL pointing to a local file, instead of an online image?