Yesterday we’ve talked about tabs on demand feature in Firefox 13 Beta and other improvements that are landed, another significant addition to Firefox 13 is reset feature which we talked earlier on this blog. Over the time you start using Firefox by installing various add-ons and themes it gets slower and slower, sometimes it crashes on startup and doesn’t starts again.
Most of these problems like crashes and slowness can be fixed by creating a new profile, but that is a difficult task and most users don’t know about this and moreover they need to migrate the data from their old profile into the new one which is also a tedious task, Mozilla now offering a “Reset Firefox” button on troubleshooting page in beta version of Firefox 13 which users can use to fix most of the problems they experience with Firefox.
Restoring Firefox to its default Settings
By applying Reset button you’ll have a:
- brand new Firefox with new profile and all your data from old profile such as bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history and form data will be migrated to the new profile
- and other settings including search engine, home page will be restored to defaults, any other toolbars will be removed.
- However extensions, themes, sync settings, tabs and tab groups will be lost.
Reset Firefox feature works with default profile only. You can find reset button by visiting “about:support” page in Firefox browser or reach there from Firefox button>Help>Troubleshooting Information.
No More Reinstalling of Firefox is needed
Soon in future versions, users will be prompted to use Reset button on troubleshooting page after third consecutive crash on startup. So you don’t need to reinstall Firefox if you face any problems with it, simple click on the the reset button, that’s it.
Source: Mozilla blog
Quite a useful feature; although it does nothing to fix corrupt installs.
My opinion is that corrupted installations isn’t major issue when compared with Firefox that crashes and slows down which is from ages now.