286575 - Make Profile Manager easier to launch - without exposing it in the UI

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Prognathous]

A couple of quotes:

(In reply to Mike Connor, Bug 263840 comment #11)
> We've chosen to deprecate Profile Manager, but retain it for development/testing
> purposes.  End users don't need it, some people still want it so its available,
> but we don't want to expose it to the world.

Fair enough, don't expose it in the UI, but make it easy for supporters to guide
clueless users to open this Manager when troubleshooting extension collisions or
other weird behaviors. Command line options are too complicated for many users.
People have actually created VBS scripts that create shortcuts that open the
Profile Manager. See http://planet.nana.co.il/ranyk/Files/CreatePMShortcut.vbs

(In reply to Asa Dotzler, Bug 214193 comment #7)
> Firefox is not going to expose profile manager or profile switching to the user
> in the UI. That it exists in the DOM Inspector is a bug, an artifact of dropping
> Seamonkey's DOM Inspector into Firefox.  If you'd like to see UI for this, it's
> going to be as an extension.

Installing an extension to launch the Profile Manager would be an overkill. In
fact, instead of having to guide users to add the host to the extensions
whitelist would, we might as well spend a few support iterations teaching those
users how to use the command line. This can be very time-consuming in some
cases. If you read Hebrew, check this level of cluelessness:
http://mozilla.org.il/board/viewtopic.php?t=2165

Two easier to use alternatives:

1. An option to restart Firefox into the Profile Manager by holding the Shift
key when exiting the browser (e.g. File -> Exit).
-and/or-
2. An option to launch Firefox into the Profile Manager by pressing and holding
the Shift key right after launching the browser. This could be useful when the
browser refuses to start.

Prog.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Nope. This decision is final, the profile manager UI is only for developers who
ought to be able to use a command line anyway. Holding keys on shutdown is not
good UI, and the shift-startup idea is already taken for safe mode (not
implemented yet, but I hope to soon).