On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 3:20 PM Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:32:36PM -0700, Dave Townsend wrote: > > In Firefox 65 we intend to ship two new features to help prevent user > > frustration caused by using profiles created by newer versions of > Firefox. > > > > Why > > > > Firefox stores all of its settings in the user’s profile and unless > certain > > command line arguments are used Firefox always launches with the same > > profile. Periodically as Firefox upgrades it makes changes to the > settings > > that can render the profile unusable by earlier versions of Firefox. This > > can cause anything from certain features of Firefox being broken after a > > downgrade to Firefox crashing on startup. > > > > To protect against this two new features will be landing in Nightly soon. > > > > Dedicated Profiles Per Install > > > > A common cause of users switching between different versions of Firefox > is > > having Firefox installed multiple times. This most often happens when > users > > have different channels installed at the same time like ESR and Release. > It > > is a common request to be able to run the different installs at the same > > time. In Firefox 35 this was made possible for the developer edition by > > giving it a dedicated profile. The new dedicated profiles per install > > feature extends this and will give every install of Firefox on the > computer > > a dedicated profile by default. > > > > Users will be able to run different installs of Firefox simultaneously. > > Each will use a different profile for its settings. Upgrading an install > of > > Firefox will keep it using the same settings. > > > > We’re tracking work on this feature in bug 1474285. > > > > Profile Downgrade Protection > > > > For cases where users manually downgrade an install of Firefox or attempt > > to forcefully use an older version of Firefox with a newer profile the > > profile downgrade protection feature will now tell the user that the > > profile is too new to use with this Firefox giving them the option to > > create a new profile to use or to quit. > > > > We’re tracking work on this feature in bug 1455707. > > > > Developer Implications > > > > As developers it is quite common to switch between different builds for > > example when testing different built versions of Firefox and doing > > regression testing. To support these use-cases a new command line > argument > > “--allow-downgrade” will allow skipping the downgrade protection. > > > > Conclusions > > > > While some users may be impacted by this change we believe that most > users > > will be unaffected and those that are will see less problems caused by > > downgrades than previously. This will give us the ability to ignore the > > possibility of downgrades when implementing new features and fixing bugs > > going forwards. Being able to make the assumption that this code works as > > designed will allow us flexibility in other changes downstream. > > Does this also mean we can actively remove old data from profiles after > this work lands? My profile is very old, and there is a non-negligible > amount of data that has accumulated that's just leftover from old data > formats that have changed and are now stored in different files. We've > never cleaned those up presumably to support downgrades. It seems to me > with downgrades officially being unsupported, we should have an active > policy of removing old profile data when we migrate to new formats. > I certainly think so. What's more we can be more proactive about not leaving that stuff around going forwards. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
