1267575 - Running "Give Firefox a tune up" -> "Refresh Firefox..." in about:support deletes your user profile.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Migration, defect)

Description

[Jukka Jylänki]

STR:

1. Start up firefox with "firefox -P"
2. Create a new profile with "Create Profile..."
3. Give it a name "new_profile_test" and let it store to the default location.
4. After creating the profile, launch with that profile and with "Use the selected profile without asking at startup"
5. When Firefox starts up, navigate to about:support
6. Choose "Refresh Firefox".
7. When refreshing is finished and the browser has reopened, close the browser.
8. Start up firefox again with "firefox".

Observed:

Instead of launching with the user profile "new_profile_test" like chosen in step 4, the profile manager window opens up, and the profile "new_profile_test" no longer exists.

Comment 1

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Hi Jukka,

Refresh works by creating a new profile, copying specific data from the old profile, moves the old profile to your desktop (home folder on Linux) in a folder "Old Firefox Data"(?) and then starts up with the new profile. This is explained at https://support.mozilla.org/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings

You should have a backup of your "new_profile_test" profile like I said and you should have a new profile named "default-" + the time in seconds since epoch for uniqueness which has the imported data from "new_profile_test".

The only problem I see so far is that the Profile Manager shouldn't have opened unless you specified certain command line arguments. Did you have any arguments for Firefox when launching in step 8? Can you attach a copy of your profiles.ini file right when this happens? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profiles.ini_file

Were you by any chance using Developer Edition? I'm wondering because it handles the default profile a bit differently.

Comment 2

[Jukka Jylänki]

No, step 8 was launched like stated, with "firefox" command line. I was using Firefox 45.0.2. Verified the same behavior with current Firefox Nightly.

Thanks for clarifying that it is intended to nuke the profile name. I was unable to see that it got renamed, since I've got dozens of "default-longnumber" profiles piled up in the profile manager, since I often need to refresh to verify that a bug STR occurs in a clean profile. Deleted all those profiles and I can now see that it did create a new default-longnumber profile.

I don't know which step you want the profiles.ini from, but here is the file after step 7:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=new
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/3hzolyj9.new

[Profile1]
Name=default-1461664405026
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/2niyc7ap.default-1461664405026

[Profile2]
Name=default-1461664640392
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/cqfg6rsr.default-1461664640392

[Profile3]
Name=default-1461758312060
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/765lcg73.default-1461758312060

[Profile4]
Name=default-1461758628395
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/u7mgezxb.default-1461758628395

What is the rationale for naming the new profile in the form "default-longnumber"? Those accumulate up, and it's difficult to know which one to go to. I typically have had profiles "stable", "beta", "devedition", "nightly" to avoid issues stemming from profiles not being compatible with different Firefox versions (bug 1246615), but after refreshing the profile, I can't associate the new name with which version of Firefox I should be using the profile with.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Jukka Jylänki from comment #2)
> What is the rationale for naming the new profile in the form
> "default-longnumber"? Those accumulate up, and it's difficult to know which
> one to go to. I typically have had profiles "stable", "beta", "devedition",
> "nightly" to avoid issues stemming from profiles not being compatible with
> different Firefox versions (bug 1246615), but after refreshing the profile,
> I can't associate the new name with which version of Firefox I should be
> using the profile with.

I just put up a patch in bug 1122124 which fixes the naming, among other things (part of why it's done the way it is is that we have to create the new profile before destroying the old one, and so we can't use the same name at that point, and the profile manager (and profile names) are not treated as user-visible UI). My patch renames the new profile to the old name after the old one is removed). I think it also fixes the issue described in comment #0.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Oops.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

We now reuse the right name in the profile name, so I think we're done here. Feel free to reopen if there's outstanding work you think we still need to do here.