Open Bug 1555324 Opened 6 years ago Updated 1 month ago

The restart buttons in about:profiles are confusing

Categories

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

Product:
Toolkit
Component:
Startup and Profile System
Version:
67 Branch
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: yoasif, Unassigned)

References

(Regression)

Details

(Keywords: regression)

From reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bucvuc/profiles_in_firefox_seem_to_have_broken_a_few/

STR:

  1. Create two profiles: profile1, profile2
  2. Start into profile1
  3. Visit about:profiles
  4. Click "Set as default profile" for profile2
  5. Click "Restart normally..."

What happens:

Firefox restarts into profile1

Expected result:

Firefox restarts into profile2

14:27.11 INFO: No more inbound revisions, bisection finished.
14:27.11 INFO: Last good revision: 351c542d6e4576a5e9e9b0035dc4780783054e58
14:27.11 INFO: First bad revision: 1bc91e8030f2b143fc23431e56b49faed564adcc
14:27.11 INFO: Pushlog:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/pushloghtml?fromchange=351c542d6e4576a5e9e9b0035dc4780783054e58&tochange=1bc91e8030f2b143fc23431e56b49faed564adcc

Regressed by: 1528252
Keywords: regression
Has Regression Range: --- → yes
Has STR: --- → yes

Yeah this was an intentional change from bug 1528252 but now I'm not totally sure that it is right. About half the times I've found myself using them I wanted what they do now and the other half what they used to do.

I think those two restart buttons are problematically labelled as it isn't clear what is going to happen when you click them. I think perhaps they should just be removed, the other profiles already have a button to launch them.

What do you think Romain?

Flags: needinfo?(rtestard)
Summary: Setting profile as default and restarting from about:profiles does not start into newly selected default → The restasrt buttons in about:profiles are confusing

I agree that button copy is confusing but unsure if removing them breaks legitimate use cases.
Michelle, were you involved when this was created? Perhaps you could point us to someone who could help address this?

Flags: needinfo?(rtestard) → needinfo?(mheubusch)
Summary: The restasrt buttons in about:profiles are confusing → The restart buttons in about:profiles are confusing
Priority: -- → P3

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Flags: needinfo?(mheubusch)
Severity: normal → S3

The fairly mundane use case is to simply switch to another profile, du-uh.
I cannot understand for the life of me how you could want "set change that should stick afterwards" and then "no I don't want it to apply now".
Ok, I reckon that logically speaking that's probably just working as a "restart current profile" now. Which could explain why you never get to see the startup profile chooser even with StartWithLastProfile=0.

I see why one would want that, but indeed it's confusing in the one page that seems KIND OF about switching profiles.
If I had to take an educate guess on the original design plan (that probably was in bug 1240022?) is that it happened before bug 1474285 made "concurrent profiles" the default behaviour.
But while people wanting the current behaviour can still probably go to about:restartrequired, I'm not aware of any way to have the other behaviour back (which isn't that trivial to obtain otherwise because if you just have a few windows open you cannot "just press X to close the browser" to switch if you want to retain them the next time).

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