1013371 - Automatically create clean profiles when -P specifies nonexistent profile.

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

When invoked from the command line with "-P profilename", Firefox should automatically create and start into that clean profile, rather than erroring out. 

This is one of a series of papercuts Marcos brought up at a recent presentation as impediments to ramping up on Gecko development, and anything that makes answering the "have you tried it with a clean profile" question a bit easier feels like the right thing.

Comment 1

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Oh god, yes please.

Comment 2

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

A bit tangential to what you're asking, but "firefox -profile /tmp/whatever" does exactly this today (but uses a directory path, instead of a profile name). Personally, I find this more useful since it's trivial to delete the profile afterwards with rm (or just ignore it, when using a tmp that resets eventually).

One thing we should be wary of is that making "-P profilename" do this is a potential footgun. If you meant to run "-P cupcake" but typo it to "-P cupcaek", you may be alarmed to find Firefox has apparently deleted your carefully curated collection of confectionery carbohydrates. This bit a lot of users back in the early days when Firefox's "this profile is already in use" dumped you back to the ProfileManager (lots of confused people created new profiles, and wondered why Firefox "lost" all their data.).

I don't think that's terribly likely to be a problem, though, since presumably someone using a command line / manual shortcut has a bit of a clue what they're doing. Let's just make sure the new profile isn't set to the default profile. [UX has mentioned that something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/ would be worth including to help support the usage of multiple profiles, which might be a modest help in this situation too.]