Transfer Firefox logins and passwords to new computer

Firefox stores your personal data, such as bookmarks, passwords and extensions on your computer. If you need to migrate all personal information from old PC to a new one, you can browse to the Firefox profile folder to back up your profile, then move your profile to a new computer. Other than that, you can also make use of Firefox Sync to sync your bookmarks, passwords, and more on every device of your own. Today, we will show you just another way to transfer all your saved logins and passwords in Firefox web browser to new computer using the built-in Firefox password management feature.

Export saved logins and passwords from Firefox on the old PC

Run Firefox web browser on your PC. Click on the menu button at the upper right corner to open the menu panel. Then choose Passwords from the drop-down menu. If you have set Primary password before, you will be prompted to enter this password now.

Click the logins menu icon (three dots) at the top right corner, then choose Export Logins… from the expanded menu.

Export saved logins and passwords from Firefox on Windows PC

A dialog box will appear to remind you that passwords are saved as readable text. Click the Export… button to continue to save it to your computer.

Firefox allows you to export this data to a .csv file. Your passwords in the exported file will not be encrypted and will be in a readable form to anyone who can view this file. So do not upload online, email or share the exported file. Make sure to delete this file when you have imported the passwords to the new Firefox installation on the new desktop or laptop.

Transfer Firefox logins and passwords to new computer

You can share this .CSV file through Bluetooth, or export it to a USB drive and then copy it to the new computer.

As we mentioned above, do not upload online, email or share the exported file since it is not encrypted.

Import passwords, logins to Firefox browser

Many users find that Firefox Import Wizard allows them to import passwords, bookmarks, and other data from other web browsers but no way to import passwords from a file.

When we open the logins management page in Firefox, we can see the options to import passwords from another browser and export saved logins from Firefox. There’s no option to import passwords or logins from a local CSV file. This is because the option to import passwords from a file is disabled by default. We can however turn it on following below steps.

Enter about:config in Firefox address bar, press Enter to access the browser configuration page. You will see the warning. Accept the warning and proceed. Type or copy and paste signon.management.page.fileImport.enabled in the preference search bar to find the option. You will see its status is false. Click the toggle to make it true.

firefox browser configuration signon.management.page.fileImport.enabled-true

Now go to Firefox Passwords page, you will have the Import from a File option.

Import passwords, logins from a file to Firefox browser

Select the .CSV file that has the passwords you want to import and click Import. All the passwords exported from previous Firefox installation will get added to the new Firefox installation on another computer. The Import Complete message displays the import summary and click Done button to complete.

7 thoughts on “Transfer Firefox logins and passwords to new computer”

  1. Im facing a unique problem with moving my firefox settings / saved logins to a new install on new laptop. The old laptop crashed and im unable start windows on it. However im able to access my fold laptop files by removing its hard disk and connecting via usb to my new laptop. Is there a way to transfer all my Firefox saved links, logins, passwords etc. manually to a USB to be coped / setup on my new laptop? Appreciate if someone could thrown some light on this if possible. Thanking you all in advance.

    1. Firefox stores your personal data, such as bookmarks, passwords, in a profile folder on your computer, in a location separate from the Firefox program. you can copy the old profile folder to USB, then copy and paste the contents of the backed up profile folder into the new profile folder, overwriting existing files of the same name on the new computer.
      #1. Finding the profile folder:
      on the new PC, run Firefox, visit “about:support”(without the quotes) in its address bar, then find Profile Folder entry and click Open Folder button to open your current profile in use in Windows Explorer. The location should be something like C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default-release.
      Although you can’t start Firefox on the old PC, but you should be able to find its Profile folder according to the location above if you still have access to its hard drive via USB.
      #2. Firefox must be closed down while copying files between profile folders. so you should firstly close Firefox on the new PC before copying profile data to its folder.
      #3. other than copying the whole profile folder to the new computer, you can choose to copy over only the minimal amount of files that contain your most important data. This is because the more files you copy and overwrite, the greater the chance of unexpected problems. for example, you can choose to copy over bookmarks, passwords, and cookies to the new profile, but not those extensions, themes, and preferences, etc. The places.sqlite file contains all your Firefox bookmarks; your passwords are stored in two different files, both of which are required:key4.db and logins.json. you can refer to following page for more details, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile

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