When is upgrade required?

jbrune

I'm a longtime user and fan of Zotero and was unaware of the new standalone and phaseout of Zotero for Firefox. Just found out when I went to install it on a classroom computer to demonstrate to my students (they always are amazed and love it, by the way). The posts from July suggest that Firefox for Windows will no longer work soon, but I have that running on all three of my computers. The one I'm on now is updated to Firefox 55.0.0.
Two questions: How much longer will I be able to use my existing Zotero for Firefox and is there an urgent need to upgrade immediately or am a fine for a while until my computer forces me to change? Second, when I upgrade should I first uninstall Zotero from Firefox before installing the new standalone 5.0 (I use Windows 8.1)?
Thanks for all your work from a big Zotero fan.

adamsmith

It's not currently urgent to update. You will still be able to use zotero 4 with firefox 56 (due out at the end of the month), though not with Firefox 57 (mid November).

If you have to, you can run Zotero 4 for longer on the 52ESR release of Firefox. See more about that and why that's not a longterm solution here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/286230/#Comment_286230

You should not uninstall the Firefox version, no. You'll want to install the Firefox 5.0 connector and then Zotero 5.0. That should handle all updates and the migration of where your data sits automatically.

jbrune

Very helpful. Thank you. Also just want to check one other thing: If I'm working on a document using Firefox Zotero but then I upgrade to 5.0, will I have any problems or will it be seemless, still knowing all the citations I have used (to know when to use abbreviated citations), endnote numbering, etc.? My guess is the codes in Word will be the same and this will be seemless but want to make sure. Thank you.

bwiernik

There is no issue with using Word documents across Zotero versions.