1554252 - Firefox doesn't start if installs.ini or profiles.ini attribute is set to read-only

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

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

Description

[David]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

Set the file profiles.ini or installs.ini to read-only and start Firefox with the profile manager and choose a profile other than the one selected. Firefox display a message box and doesn't start properly.

Actual results:

Unable to start Firefox except if we disable the read only state of the concerned files.
I didn't found another solution to always have the same default profile.

Expected results:

Start Firefox with the default profile; because the profile.ini file is set as read only the default profile never change.
This way worked correctly for several year but this bug has appeared with the version 67.0

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

What is the use case here?

Comment 2

[David]

The purpose is to always have the same default profile.
Is the profile.ini file has a read-write access the selected profile is the last used.

Comment 3

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Choosing a profile in the profile manager means setting that profile as the new default and so an error is thrown when attempting to save that change to disk. I guess arguably the error in this case is ignorable but in general I dislike the idea of supporting the case of setting important Firefox settings files to be read only. Will think about this a bit more.

Comment 4

[David]

This workaround is not perfect and it should be better to have a new option to freeze the default profile.

Comment 5

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to David from comment #4)

This workaround is not perfect and it should be better to have a new option to freeze the default profile.

I don't see that happening. If you wanted to always launch Firefox with a fixed profile then you should use the command line arguments to select it when you run Firefox.

Comment 7

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

I'm going to say that running Firefox with profiles.ini set as readonly is unsupported.