286830 - Profile manager does not open when starting holding Option/Alt on Macintosh

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Mark Mentovai]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050318 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050318 Firefox/1.0+

Have a patch.

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile: "In order to create a new
profile, you use the Profile Manager.  To start the Profile Manager...On Mac OS
X, hold down the Option key and double click the Firefox icon."

This does not work in Firefox aviary-1.0.1 or trunk.  It does work in
Mozilla/Seamonkey.  The profile manager will appear on Mac OS X if Firefox is
launched with -profilemanager (as on generic Unix and Windows builds), but this
is not in accord with the documentation, and Mac users aren't expected to be as
comfortable with the Terminal as users of other platforms.  The code to request
the profile manager when the option/alt key is down at startup is present in
Firefox, but occurs AFTER a profile is selected, so the profile manager never
appears.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Firefox must not be configured to display the profile manager at startup. 
(It's usually not, and because of this bug, difficult to change this behavior on
Mac OS X.)
2. Double-click Firefox with the option key held down.  (If launching from the
Finder, expect the parent window to close, as option-double click has this
meaning in the Finder.)
Actual Results:  
Firefox opens using the last-used profile

Expected Results:  
Firefox should have opened the profile manager and not launched the browser with
any profile until the user selected a profile.

Comment 1

[Mark Mentovai]

Attachment: fix

Comment 2

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

*** Bug 287754 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

*** Bug 289279 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Mark Mentovai]

Ping mano?

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I have decided that the old behavior is not desirable. I would like to use
option-start to launch safe mode/extension manager.

Comment 6

[Mark Mentovai]

This makes it VERY difficult for Mac users to reach the profile manager.  If you
really want to axe it, the docs should at least be updated.

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile

Comment 7

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Yes, I'll update the docs.

Comment 8

[Mark Mentovai]

The docs now specify:
|On Linux or Mac, start Firefox with the the -profilemanager switch, e.g.
|./firefox -profilemanager (this assumes that you're in the firefox directory).

This doesn't work for the Mac, and it's beyond the abilities of typical Mac
users without a little more hand-holding.  Mac users need to be instructed to
open the Terminal by double-clicking its icon in /Applications/Utilities, then
dragging the Firefox icon into the Terminal window to copy its path to the
command line, and then type:

/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager

so that the command line looks like:

/path/to/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager.

(/path/to is usually expected to be /Applications)

Comment 9

[Adam Guthrie]

*** Bug 310616 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Adam Guthrie]

*** Bug 348032 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Matt Dudziak]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Yes, I'll update the docs.
> 

The Docs @ http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/profile still say that holding down the Option key while launching will bring up the profile manager under OS X. It doesn't, so either the Docs need to be updated, or preferably this feature needs to be put back into Thunderbird...