1449922 - Remove obsolete command line parameters

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

-silent
Added in toolkit for Fennec's Debian packaging in bug 469076 9 years ago.
Added in browser/ in bug 324023 12 years ago. Meant to be used along with -setDefaultBrowser. I doubt this is used.

-chrome
I doubt this is still useful now that add-ons can't register chrome packages anymore.
We could keep the "chrome://browser/content/pref/pref.xul" and "chrome://browser/content/preferences/preferences.xul" special case that opens the preferences. This was added 13 years ago in bug 285416. I don't know how likely users are to still have shortcuts pointing to this in their start menu. It's probably pretty rare at this point.

-print-xpcom-dir
-print-xpcom-dirlist
Added in bug 375710 11 years ago as "debugging code" (bug 375710 comment 75). Doesn't seem to have been used since that.

We could maybe even remove toolkit/components/nsDefaultCLH.js entirely. It provides the above two -print-xpcom-dir* parameters, the -silent parameter, toolkit.singletonWindowType (the last consumer of this was Instantbird), toolkit.defaultChromeURI (which has some references in m-c, but none of them in Firefox Desktop).
Like all command line handlers, this component is loaded during startup, and for apparently very little value for Firefox users.

Comment 1

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

`-chrome` is used by the Browser Toolbox[1] to start a separate Firefox with a custom window. If we really want to remove the CLI arg, we'll need to craft a different approach for Browser Toolbox to use here.

[1]: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/7e663b9fa578d425684ce2560e5fa2464f504b34/devtools/client/framework/ToolboxProcess.jsm#273

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Fwiw, I use -silent to script a "do one run that sets up profile and does whatever fastload saving and so forth we do on first run, then run for real" debugging workflow.

Comment 3

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Boris Zbarsky [:bz] (no decent commit message means r-) from comment #2)
> Fwiw, I use -silent to script a "do one run that sets up profile and does
> whatever fastload saving and so forth we do on first run, then run for real"
> debugging workflow.

For this use case you probably don't mind having a blank window that appears and gets closed quickly. Bug 1448135 comment 10 is what made me want to check how much we care about -silent and -chrome working correctly.