260206 - Firefox inappropriately places non-user-settings in "application data" folder

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 74085

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Oli Restorick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Crazy Browser 1.0.5)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

This is a blocker for anyone using roaming profiles on a network.  Firefox 
placed 5Mb of mostly non-user-setting stuff that doesn't need to roam between 
machines in the "application data" folder.  This is incorrect behaviour for an 
application.

You should place only user settings (ini files, etc) in the "%userprofile%
\application data" folder.  Other things that don't need to roam should be 
placed in "%userprofile%\local settings\application data".

The average profile size on my network is 5Mb.  With firefox installed, it 
increases to 10Mb, which is unacceptable.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

care to actually explain what data you think we shouldn't be storing in the profile?

Comment 2

[Oli Restorick]

Well, as I haven't been involved in writing code for this project and given 
that I don't have the ability to read binary files and deduce their purpose, 
it's a little difficult to know what exactly you are storing.

Suffice to say that if it's a user preference that should be retained when the 
user moves to a new computer, it should be placed in %appdata%.  If it's 
something that the user wouldn't expect to travel with them (their cache 
files, for instance), it should go in the local settings folder, which is 
automatically on Windows' exclude list.

As it stands, your app takes as much space to store user settings than the 
whole of Windows 2000, Office 2000, Internet Explorer and the 16 business-
related apps that get placed on my standard build.

Basically, Firefox should store the same stuff that Internet Explorer does in 
the profile.  If you used the HKCU hive of the registry, your storage space 
would probably go down by a heck of a lot.

Cheers

Comment 3

[timeless]

see, that's kinda funny, because some people do expect their cache to roam with
them. i certainly do.

depending on how your system is configured, sharing the fastload cache might be
a bad idea, but figuring that out is kinda hard.

as for the hkcu hive of the registry, i presume you're talking about moving all
of our preferences into there so that we couldn't share a profile between
operating systems, which would make some of our users jump for joy.

you're welcome to write patches to do these things, and i hope to see them land
in the bit bucket.

Comment 4

[Oli Restorick]

Whatever.  Just submitting a bug.  If you want to ignore it, don't complain 
when companies can't easily adopt your browser.

Why don't you outdo Internet Explorer?  You have the basics in place.  Seems 
like you're content to stop short of making it a well-behaved app just for the 
sake of a few Linux users.  Oh well...  It doesn't have to be that making it 
work properly on Windows stops interoperability.

Timeless, you could generate the bloated settings files in the local settings 
area from a more compact version stored in HKCU.  That would reduce Firefox's 
bloat somewhat.

Fact remains, Firefox is useless on a managed business network and you give no 
easy way to make it good.  Some group policy settings to actually get some 
control of the thing would be good as well, but hey, Linux doesn't have group 
policy, so it'll never happen.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

lots of people use it on a managed business network.  It has nothing to do with
Linux and everything to do with "what should roam and what shouldn't" and how
the app is set up.

If you don't want disk cache (probably the chief offender size-wise) following
you around from location to location, it'd be easy to limit the disk cache pref
to 0.  You'd still have memory (session) cache in that case.

The actual preferences file (prefs.js) is 2k on my system. This is because we
only save prefs that aren't set to the default, so your assertion that using the
HKCU hive would be better is pretty much wrong.  And if its right, its nothing
resembling a real-world performance difference.

Comment 6

[Oli Restorick]

OK, point taken.

Perhaps it's that it's difficult to see what all the files in the Mozilla 
directory actually do by looking at them.  This stuff may be documented 
somewhere, in which case I'm guilty of not RTFM.

At least if you can set the cache to 0k, you're already one up on Internet 
Explorer, where 1Mb is the minimum.

Still, it would be nice to know what all that gunk in my profile folder is.  
Perhaps it's the tabbed browsing add-on that I tried (and failed) to use to 
make Firefox behave like Crazy Browser.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Oli

Comment 7

[timeless]

perhaps like the documentation at
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7/installation.html#files

Comment 8

[Erlendur S Thorsteinsson]

Isn't this bug a duplicate of bug 74085?

Comment 9

[Oli Restorick]

Indeed, it is a duplicate of that bug.  Very interesting thread, and it looks 
like the issues I've raised are on the radar.

Cheers

Oli

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 74085 ***