295805 - The random string in profile name just adds confusion/profiles are unecessary in Mac OS X (and a lot of other OS:es too)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[db]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

The random string in the profile name just adds confusion.

Profiles are unecessary in mulit-user OS:es

Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
A profile a with unpredictable name

Expected Results:  
If you insist on profiles the user should be allowed to decide its name. A good
default value might be the user's short name.

But better yet, just remove the concept of profiles in Firefox for Mac OS X. No
(? well, except for some Mozilla-projects) other applications needs them and FF
shouldn't need them either.

Random strings in directory names is inconsistent with the rest of nameing
convention used in Mac OS X.

Comment 1

[Jaime Mitchell (use [e-mail] for email)]

The random string is done to prevent overwriting an existing profile.

If you want to create a new profile at a specific location then you can do that
with the profile manager.

BTW your firefox version is very out of date.

-> WontFix?

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Whether we have a single profile or multiple profiles, its still a profile.  The
core code Firefox uses expects profiles, so we follow that lead.  The random
string is actually in place to make certain types of data mining attacks more
difficult, iirc (i.e. if I can get from the OS that your username is "skippy"
then I know ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/skippy/bookmarks.html
is your bookmarks file, etc.

We removed this a while back, and put it back because the above concerns were
heavily voiced.