1757720 - Drop support for named profiles

Status: NEW

(Testing :: geckodriver, task, P3)

Description

[James Graham [:jgraham]]

When firefox is started with -P <name> we don't know the profile directory, so we can't do things like set required prefs or read the marionette start port.

There are bascially three things we could do here:

• Ignore it and rely on the user to correctly configure the profile (essentially what we're doing at the moment). This has the disadvantage that people are unlikely to understand what they need to do to make this work. It's also low value; if you know a profile exists you can pass in the path to the profile just as easily as the name.
• Figure out the path to the profile from the name. The problem with this is that the code to find the profile given the name is inside Firefox and not exposed in a way we can use. Duplicating this code inside geckodriver is complex and error prone.
• Fail to create a session when using a named profile. This has the problem that it's a breaking change, and might break some users. But it's also the only option that doesn't have an ongoing maintance cost either for geckodriver users or developers.

Overall dropping support seems to have the best cost/benefit in the long term, so we'll do that after warning for at least one release.

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

To include this feature drop into any milestone we should decide on what we actually wanna do. For now removing from the 0.32.0 release.

Comment 2

[James Graham [:jgraham]]

I think we should drop support, but maybe do a release with a warning before we finally turn it off.