As promised here is that update. We have cleaned up the experience so that it only impacts nightly until it rides the trains and added a snazzy new first-run UI that explains what is going on. The plan is to land this at the start of the 67 nightly cycle.
On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 10:32 AM Dave Townsend <dtowns...@mozilla.com> wrote: > 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
