1406300 - Profile manager not managable for large list of profiles

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect, P5)

Description

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0
Build ID: 20170928135647

Steps to reproduce:

Use Firefox profiles often and have 300 profiles. Try to find one of those profiles.


Actual results:

Not easy. There is no way to search the list of profiles. You have to resort to opening ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini and performing a text search, then scrolling manually.


Expected results:

The following should be available:
- filter list of profiles (text box with search string, like in eg Transmission)
- filter is a case insensitive string match with matching of character classes (e.g. å in the profile name is matched by a in the search string, and ß by s)
- filter has wildcards: * matches a string of any length.
- sort profiles by name, date of creation (current default), date of last use
(sorting should happen using natural number sort among others)
- sort should happen top to bottom, i.e. the latest used or latest created profile should be at the top, not at the bottom as it is right now (saves keyboard strokes / scrolling by mouse)
- all those actions should be accessible from the keyboard with 0 mouse use
- the sort settings should be remembered by the profile manager


Possibly related bug 248648

Comment 1

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

Have you you tried about:profiles? I am mainly keeping this open for the suggestions to improve searching and sorting there.

Comment 2

[cheater]

@past about:profiles does not fix my issue. The point is to quickly launch Firefox with the right profile. What you suggest requires starting a Firefox instance, typing in a difficult to remember address, digging through hard to read debugging output, and then launching the profile manager again, and manually scrolling through the list of profiles (again because there is no way to search it) and then finally selecting that and starting a second instance of Firefox. A tremendous task for something that should be dead simple.

I don't think you've analyzed this issue from an UX angle - do you have the background required for UX issues? Based on all that I'd like to respectfully ask you to remove the "wontfix" flag.

Comment 3

[cheater]

@past could you comment on this please?

Comment 4

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

The wontfix flag is set for 57 only. It is too late for a fix for this to land, even if there was a patch already attached to this bug, reviewed and ready for uplift to beta (nightly is 58 now). Since we aren't even close to having a patch ready, this is just for the sanity of our release dashboards.

As for the bigger picture, I will defer to product and UX for a final call on this bug as a whole. I can tell you however that my understanding of our plans for the standalone profile manager is to not keep it around for long and certainly not make any changes to it. You can read up on some of the discussion in the bugs that implemented about:profiles.

Comment 5

[cheater]

Thank you, that is a good explanation. I don't care if it goes in 57 as long as eventually I will have a quick way of launching the profile I want without an involved multi-step process. If the profile manager is being remmoved and there's nothing to replace it in this responsibility (quickly launch the right profile) then the UX team should probably look into that. Personally I don't care if this is done using the current profile manager or some other code. However, I can currently press 1 key to bring up the profile manager (using my window manager to call the firefox binary) and them start typing the profile name and press enter to launch it; if that's not possible with whatever that is getting replaced it then it's a big regression for me.

Comment 6

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

To be clear, I haven't heard of any plans to remove the old profile manager yet. But if your preferred workflow is launching "firefox -ProfileManager", then the more future-proof equivalent would be "firefox about:profiles". Passing any URL in the command line will make firefox open a window to that URL that you can resize, search using Ctrl-F, etc.

Comment 7

[cheater]

First you say "my understanding of our plans for the standalone profile manager is to not keep it around for long and certainly not make any changes to it" and then you say "I haven't heard of any plans to remove the old profile manager yet". Please explain this drastic discrepancy. I think you are trying to push me towards using about:profiles for some reason, a tool that is not fit to the purpose of the task I am performing.

Comment 8

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

As I said in the other bug, bugzilla is not the place for discussing project plans. Take your proposal to firefox-dev instead.

I have no intention whatsoever to push you towards anything. If about:profiles isn't useful to you, by all means don't use it. To clarify the ambiguity of future plans: there are no *immediate* plans to remove the old profile manager. There have been proposals in the past to remove it at some point in the future though.

This is the last needinfo I will entertain for the discussion in this bug. Please follow up in firefox-dev.

Comment 9

[andreas.thalhammer]

I have the same issue, and had it for years, but since a lately it didn't bother me that much because I had only < 10 profiles. But now I use more (> 60). So, I also started wandering why in every other window with lots and lots of information I get to have a quick-search function to find the relevant information (e.g. passwords), while the Profile Manager dialog seems ancient.

My system: Gentoo Linux, so naturally I use the Gentoo build of Firefox. But I also installed Firefox on lots of other computers, Windows 7/10/11 and various Linux distributions (but mostly Debian GNU/Linux), and it's the same everywhere: a very tiny Profile-Manager window from Firefox's past.

Today I tried to resize the window and what happened was this: the window gets bigger, but the buttons and the list box with profiles maintains its original size.

While I do love Firefox and the development of the UI in the past years, I see that one of the great features of Firefox, the multi profile capability, is not following the general trend. If I could code I would probably find that it would be very simple to just make the GUI elements resize with the window itself. Implementing a quick-search function would be harder, but would make a lot of sense.

I know this is an old thread and sorry for stealing it. I just had no idea that a bug report existed already that was that old. Sorry for the noise.