On 2017-06-23 06:43 PM, 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.
I've noticed that Firefox Developer Edition doesn't respect the "Use the
selected profile without asking at startup" button (eg: if I select my
non-devedition profile with that checked, it still starts with the
DevEdition profile next time). If we're enabling similar logic across
all channels, we should probably fix this or get rid of the button
(since it will serve no function AFAICT).
- Ben
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