301012 - crashes at startup if user doesn't have write permissions to profile directory

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[greatbunzinni]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050711 Firefox/1.0.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050711 Firefox/1.0.5

If firefox starts and the user doesn't have write permissions to the profile
directory, firefox crashes without a single warning of what is happening. This
happens if firefox is installed/started by root and then a non-root user tries
to run firefox.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.install and 1st run firefox in root
2.close firefox
3.launch firefox as normal user

Actual Results:  
firefox launches and crashes without a single warning

Expected Results:  
there are several options:
a) give a warning message if it isn't possible to write to the profile directory
b) when installing firefox, set the directory's permissions so that there isn't
a problem writing to it (not a good option)

the same problem happens when adding search engines. If the user who adds the
search engines doesn't have write permissions, firefox acts as if the engine is
installed but it isn't.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 88822 ***

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Bug 88822 was a Talkback bug.  I don't think this is a dup.