Has anyone had similar experiences with Norton installs destroying existing bookmarks etc. ?
As a newbie I hope this is an appropriate place to post.
I have just installed NIS 2011
I use FireFox 3.6.12 as my default browser on a Windows XP pro. Initially I was pleased to see a Norton Toolbar and Norton extensions on my firefox browser, a good indication NIS would work with FireFox. That was shortlived as I quickly realised I had lost FF profiles, extensive FF bookmarks, and many FF extensions.
The bookmarks backups that normally exist by default had gone, and as far as I can see this is because NIS decided to make anew install of FF3.6.12 over my existing FF3.6.12 wiping out many of the customisations I had made. Recently FF has been very reliable with bookmarks, I have not needed to rely on the auto bookmark backup or my own exported backups, and had grown rather complacent. I have lost an awful lot of bookmarks, since my last exported backups. My extensions I will get back quickly. The differing profiles though are also lost, and will cause some inconvenience to reset.
I can not imagine I am the only person suffering through this, even if only a minority use differing profiles, many users will use extensions and bookmarks.
I think at the very least you should warn users of the need to backup bookmarks before installing NIS. Better still why not allow users to manually install the Norton toolbar themselves. I note that possibly similar issues occurred last year see this post
Oddly from the main NIS page if I use the "Account" option that uses IE, despite me having set FF as the default browser. Had you used IE and added the Norton toolbar to that and destroyed the settings and bookmarks there I would not really of cared, I rarely use IE, other than to do comparisons between browser behaviour.
Has anyone had similar experiences with Norton installs destroying existing bookmarks etc. ?
As a newbie I hope this is an appropriate place to post.
I have just installed NIS 2011
I use FireFox 3.6.12 as my default browser on a Windows XP pro. Initially I was pleased to see a Norton Toolbar and Norton extensions on my firefox browser, a good indication NIS would work with FireFox. That was shortlived as I quickly realised I had lost FF profiles, extensive FF bookmarks, and many FF extensions.
The bookmarks backups that normally exist by default had gone, and as far as I can see this is because NIS decided to make anew install of FF3.6.12 over my existing FF3.6.12 wiping out many of the customisations I had made. Recently FF has been very reliable with bookmarks, I have not needed to rely on the auto bookmark backup or my own exported backups, and had grown rather complacent. I have lost an awful lot of bookmarks, since my last exported backups. My extensions I will get back quickly. The differing profiles though are also lost, and will cause some inconvenience to reset.
I can not imagine I am the only person suffering through this, even if only a minority use differing profiles, many users will use extensions and bookmarks.
I think at the very least you should warn users of the need to backup bookmarks before installing NIS. Better still why not allow users to manually install the Norton toolbar themselves. I note that possibly similar issues occurred last year see this post
Oddly from the main NIS page if I use the "Account" option that uses IE, despite me having set FF as the default browser. Had you used IE and added the Norton toolbar to that and destroyed the settings and bookmarks there I would not really of cared, I rarely use IE, other than to do comparisons between browser behaviour.
NIS 2011 is presumably relativly recent and probably only a small percentage of FireFox users utilise profiles.
I have been setting up replacement profiles and re-importing bookmarks.
Even profiles that I could not start from command "firefox.exe-ProfileManager" did still have the autobackup bookmarks when I looked for them.
Is there any way of obtaining the Norton toolbar with the two extensions other than going through the NIS instalation routine and uninstalling and re-installing NIS. ( The extensions just link back to the Symantec home page rather than a download site. ) If not I will have to be carefull to keep them available.
What were you using prior to NIS2011? I utilise Firefox profiles with many extensions and bookmarks and have never suffered from this after installing NIS2011.
Thanks for the reply, It was a new install of NIS2011 using a CD, I had previously been using McAfee.
This is a rather old machine however, which I hope to replace shortly. For reasons I will not go into, but could be relavant, it at present is only using XP pro sp2. and has only 3/8 GB RAM with a rather overfull C: drive. It does tend to have stability problems. Problems could be down to my machine, and its setup, but my initial presumption was that NIS could not handle installations properly if FireFox profiles were in use.
I could uninstall & reinstall NIS to see if the same happens again, but that may not really answer anything or recreate the problem, if for instance the issue was related to the MCAfee uninstall that has already been uninstalled and I will then be re-installing with remnants of NIS on rahter than with McAfee.
My main problem is resolved in that I did not really loose many bookmarks, thanks to firefox auto backup of bookmarks.
I could mark the post question as answered but wonder if it is better to leave it open in-case others come across similar problems, or are interested in getting to the bottom of the cause of this.
I did ask
Obtaining toolbar if there was a way to obtain the Norton toolbar again if it is removed other than doing a reinstall, but that question is ancillary to the thread topic/title, and I am probably unlikely to remove it, as it can be hidden from view or turned off anyway.
IE used for 'account' I also wondered why with the installation was modifying FF and adding a norton toolbar, but the main screen for NIS was using IE if 'account' is clicked, but again the question is rather trivial.