Just a heads up, we've decided to defer this change to a later release to make sure we get the experience right for our users. I'll post another update once we have a better idea of when this will land.
On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:32 PM Dave Townsend <dtowns...@mozilla.com> 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. > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
