It's funny how support questions tend to group together.
Yesterday I wrote a tutorial on how to kick-start keychain syncing with .Mac after 3 .Mac related questions were asked this week alone.
Now today we have had 2 Flock install related questions come in, so I figured I'd write this tutorial before the 3rd question arrives :)
If 1Passwd ever fails to install its toolbar into Flock or Firefox, it is most likely that your Firefox/Flock profile was created (or migrated from) an older version of Firefox that had a bug when assigning folder names. Let me explain.
It is unclear why such a cryptic scheme was needed, but the Mozilla engineers chose the following naming convention for profiles:
2om1bqm4.default
uy6hycwc.dave
These names represent folder names and the first part is randomly generated. SubFolders are then created with these names in this folder for Flock:
/Users/<your-id>/Library/Application\ Support/Flock/Profiles/
and for Firefox:
/Users/<your-id>/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/
Sometimes these profiles can be corrupt or contain unexpected data, usually caused when copying profile files from a much earlier version of Firefox, or from a Windows/Linux machine.
Anyway, I've found the easiest way to fix this is to create a new profile. Sadly Firefox doesn't make this process "Mac Like", and decided to go with its Windows roots. Luckily it is not that bad, as long as you copy and paste the full line.
First, launch the Terminal application; it can be found in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Then run this command for Flock:
cd /Applications/Flock.app/Contents/MacOS
or for Firefox:
cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
That command will place you in the right folder. Now you can launch Flock with a special parameter:
./flock-bin -ProfileManager
or for Firefox:
./firefox-bin -ProfileManager
For reference, here's what you can expect to see after running these commands:
This last command will bring up the Flock/Firefox Profile Manager, where you can click Create Profile:
Clicking this will open the two page setup assistant, where you only really need to specify one piece of information, namely the name of the new profile:
That's it! You now have a new Flock/Firefox profile:
Highlight the new profile and click Start. Note that you must start Flock/Firefox at least once before going onto the next step otherwise the folders needed by 1Passwd will not be available and the next step will fail.
Now with the new Profile setup and configured, you can install the 1Passwd toolbar. Launch 1Passwd and go to the Preferences (⌘,) and click on the Browser pane. Find the new Firefox/Flock profile, highlight it, and then enable the checkbox in the Installed column:
Once you restart Flock/Firefox, the 1Passwd toolbar icon should now be available.
One caveat is that your new profile will not have your old bookmarks, extensions, passwords, etc. To rectify this, you can copy the files from the old profile folder into the new one.
