1444916 - Provide key shortcuts for restarting the browser in about:profiles

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

There are multiple reasons why people want to restart Firefox from time to time.

From :sebo on bug 1429421:
> to tighten up memory, to fix a UI glitch, to tighten up the list of add-ons after removing one of them, etc.

From :freddyb in bug 1429421:
> When testing security-related stuff that requires to restart the browser

Now, I'm sure other people have other reasons for restarting the browser every once in a while.

Because of this, we have noticed a large number of the GCLI[1] users tend to just use one command only, and that's the restart command.

GCLI is a big piece of code that is largely unmaintained and we would like to remove it because it is getting almost no usage at all.
However, for the few users that do use it, the restart command is amazing, because it's keyboard-friendly. It's very fast and easy for these people to press shift+F2 to focus the command line and then type a few first letters, then type, then enter.

Since we will be removing GCLI soon, I wanted to file this idea which came from a discussion about restart: having a keyboard shortcut in about:profiles to activate the restart button. Right now it requires a click (and btw, I don't think it can be navigated to with the keyboard currently, might be out of the tab sequence).

It would be great to make this common action for some people very easy to get to on this page.

[1] This is the codename for the Developer Toolbar (which you can open with shift+F2), a command line for the browser.

Comment 1

[:Paolo Amadini]

I think there was some related discussion in the mailing lists. Is this bug report still relevant?

Comment 2

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

You are right, this bug report can be closed. The new way to restart the browser which has been discussed on the mailing list is by using the browser console.
1. open the browser console (Ctrl+Shift+J on Windows)
2. press ctrl+alt+R