Firefox Aurora: here is how you get your old profile back

So Mozilla decided to make the Aurora channel of the Firefox web browser stand out a bit from the rest by rebranding it to Firefox Developer version and moving it out of the release chain.

While it will still receive updates once they passed through the Nightly version, it is tot handing those updates over to the Beta channel anymore after the second six week period.

On top of all that, Mozilla has added distinguishable features to the browser version.

This starts with a new theme that features squared tabs instead of the rounded tabs of the Australis builds of Firefox (every other build).

The theme is also dark and not light, and while it is possible to move back to the old theme easily using the customize menu of the browser, it is a stark contrast to the default theme.

One of the issues that current Aurora users may have run into is that Mozilla decided to create a new profile for the browser. Intended to run alongside other versions of Firefox, it caused issues for existing Aurora users because it switched to that new profile automatically.

What this means is that Aurora users may have noticed that their bookmarks, history or installed extensions are not there anymore because of the new profile that got loaded automatically.

There are two options to resolve that issue quickly:

Start Firefox with the -p parameter. This opens the Profile Manager of the browser listing all available profiles. Select the old one from the list and it should load it just fine afterwards. On Windows, you right-click on the Firefox shortcut (on the desktop or start menu) and select properties. There you add -p to the end of the target field and make sure that a space is between it and the path.

The second option is the following: Load about:preferences in Firefox's address bar and make sure the General group is selected.

There you find a new option to "allow Firefox Developer Edition and Firefox to run at the same time".

Uncheck the option and restart Firefox. It should load the old profile again automatically.

There is a third option as well. You could move to another Firefox channel, say Beta and run it as the default browser. This won't interfere with the Developer Edition and running the new channel on your system will load your old user profile automatically in the process.