On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 03:43:54PM -0700, Dave Townsend wrote: > TL;DR: We should make each Firefox channel use its own profile data > allowing you to run multiple channels at the same time. > > Running multiple channels of Firefox is currently harder than it needs to > be. You can't start more than one channel at a time and either you use the > same profile data for each channel running the risk of hitting bugs with > downgrades or you have to create custom shortcuts to use different profiles > for each channel. The exception to this is the developer edition which uses > its own profile data by default. This turned out to be what most developers > wanted and matches Chrome's behaviour. So we should do the same thing for > the other channels. > > The technical details of how to do this are a little challenging so here is > a proposal that hopes to limit the impact of the change: > > * Release will continue to work as it does today. The default profile > listed in profiles.ini will be loaded and used as normal. > * When Nightly and Beta first start they will look for a profile to use: > ** First choice will be determined by a new flag in profiles.ini for each > channel. > ** Second choice will be a profile with a specific name which will be > different for each channel. We do this because if the user runs an older > build of Firefox it will blow away the new flags we use above. > ** Finally if no profile has been found a new profile will be created with > the appropriate name. > * Throughout, if the command line includes --profile or -P to choose a > specific profile then we respect that. > > The developer edition already does effectively the above just without the > custom flag which allows you to rename your profile ( > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1098986). As part of this we > would upgrade developer edition to support this too. > > How we populate the new profile we create for Nightly and Beta channels is > an open question. We could simply clone the existing Release profile or use > Firefox Refresh to copy across the basic data. In either case we can notify > the user to let them know what has happened. > > If users still want to share profiles between channels then they will have > that option going forwards by simply going to about:profiles and choosing a > different default profile for the channel they are running. > > The main issue with this proposal is what happens if users downgrade > Nightly or Beta to a version before we make these changes. They will revert > back to the existing profile selection mechanism, effectively sharing > profiles with the release channel again. Upgrading again will take them > back to their new default profile unless they have renamed it away from the > custom name we choose in which case a new default will be created again. > > Does anyone think we shouldn't do this or have comments on my proposal for > implementing it?
It sounds like this will make every user of non-Release create a new profile, while, in practice, few of them are juggling with versions. How about only switching to a new profile if the update channel is different from the last time the existing profile was used? Also, what about ESR? Mike _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
