277828 - Different versions of Firefox don't contact the running instance, leading to profile wars

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

Specifically, you can end up with "default" vs. "Default User", and users who
aren't hip to profile management can become confused, think they've lost their
profile data, ping-pong between the two, etc.

Bryner said something about using only the app name (without any version) when
finding the running instance.

/be

Comment 1

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

BTW, why do we use "default" in some cases for the default profile name, and
"Default User" in others?  Seems like a bug in itself, but feel free to fix here
or file separately!

/be

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

We don't currently use the version, remoting is by app name only.

"default" is the profile name that happens when you first run the app. "Default
User" is the profile name that comes up in the profile manager UI if you create
another profile.

I own several bugs targeted at 1.8b for making the profile manager backend and
UI less confusing. Basically, we're not going to show the profile manager UI by
default if the default profile is locked; we're going to show a dialog "Firefox
is currently running, please close the existing instance.", perhaps with a
button that will force-kill the existing instance.

We also need to figure out why there are "zombie" firefox processes hanging
around and forcing the profile manager UI open. Before 1.0 I was able to
reproduce that consistently on washingtonpost.com when I had danm's
single-window mode enabled, but when we disabled that I didn't follow up
further. I can still occasionally reproduce a zombie process when I've loaded
java apps or block popup windows.