1517733 - On recent versions, Firefox and Dev edition started using the same profile

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[u630168]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0

Steps to reproduce:

Until some time ago, just installing Firefox Developer Edition alongside Firefox and selecting the "allow Firefox Developer Edition and Firefox to run at the same time" option would make the two browsers flawlessly use two separate profiles. I just had them both installed and used them without any trouble, until recently.


Actual results:

At some non-specified point in the last year, Firefox started overwriting and using the dev-edition-default profile (the same Developer Edition uses). This happened in exactly the same way on both my Windows and Linux systems. I looked up if someone had encountered similar issues, like bug 1098986, but this one seems to be a recent issue. It also looks like this reddit user had the same problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7vv7ll/firefox_and_firefox_developer_edition_using_the/
but they dismissed it as a Sync-derived issue, which wasn't my case as I don't use Sync.


Expected results:

Firefox Developer Edition should create and use a profile named dev-edition-default, and Firefox should keep using the one named default, if the user never selects different profiles manually.

Comment 1

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Do you know when this started? 
Could you please try with mozregression to identify when it started?
https://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/quickstart.html

Comment 2

[u630168]

I found out by loading the old profile in my Windows installation that the most recent bookmark I have on the "default" profile is from 9/5/2018. The first bookmark from after that date I have on "dev-edition-default" is from 9/9/2018. The issue must be in a version of Firefox which came out in that 4 days interval since I have automatic updates.

By analyzing my bookmarks on both profiles I've noticed an interesting pattern: at the time when Firefox started using "dev-edition-default", it didn't actually overwrite it's bookmarks (and I remember indeed a time when I thought Firefox randomly lost my old bookmarks) but kept those of Developer Edition and started adding to those. I can't say for sure about the other settings though. What's sure is that, sometime between 9/5/2018 and 9/9/2018, the Windows version of Firefox started running with profile "dev-edition-default" instead of "default". This is not when I installed Firefox Developer Edition on Windows as I've been using that one since at least 2017. 

The date when the issue occurred should be about the same on Ubuntu as well since I remember correctly using the two browsers separately to test an application in late August 2018 there.

Comment 3

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Can you attach the profiles.ini file to this bug report, you should find it in C:\Users\<your Windows login username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

Comment 4

[u630168]

Attachment: profiles.ini

Sure, please notice though that, after the mess happened and I understood what happened, I renamed "default" to "default-old" (as it wasn't the profile I was using anymore) and "dev-edition-default" to "default", in order to leave a free space in case I wanted to start using Firefox Developer Edition again.

Comment 5

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

While we figure out this issue, let's move it out of Untriaged.

Comment 6

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Did you happen to do a profile refresh on dev-edition? This might be bug 1367391.

Comment 7

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Cannot reproduce this and with all the profile changes in 67 I'd expect this to be fixed. Please re-open if this occurs again.