301547 - RFE: Camino should share profiles with Firefox

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[db]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: 

This must be a duplicate but I couldn't find any other report.

Camino should share profiles with Firefox, that is, the same bookmarks, history,
cookies, cache etc should be used. In areas where this might conflict with Mac
OS X default store or fucntionality, for example, certificates, it should be a
user option to select whether you want use certificates from Firefox password
manager or Mac OS X's Keychain.

This latter case introduces some interesting use cases, what if you start by
using FF's certificates but after a while change your mind and want to use the
certificates in the Keychain? I think it would be extremely nice if Camino then
offered to export/import the data between Firefox and Keychain. Obviously, this
shouldn't be a one way feature, if you begin by using Keychain and later change
your mind and want to use FF's password manager, Camino should support
export/import in that direction too.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Comment 1

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

I'm not sure I agree with this. We do things differently than Firefox and, IMO,
better. But I suppose it's up to the devs.

Comment 2

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

no we don't want to do this, many of the prefs have different values from
firefox by design. sharing the profiles would be out of the question. it would
also make it so that you couldn't run both at the same time, which some people
do for testing and web development.

WONTFIX

Comment 3

[db]

Again, let that be an option for the user. I would like to share at least the
more dynamic content of my profile, like history and bookmarks (last visits).
Supporting this would allow an easier migration to Camino.

I don't want to critisize but this sounds a lot like NIH.

As well as you could have most internet prefs in one location in Mac OS 9 (via
Internet Config) I would like to abstract them as much as possible in Mac OS X
too. This would be a first (great) step.

Comment 4

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

We have different bookmarks and history implementations, so sharing those are
not possible.  For migration purposes, bookmarks can be imported from Fx.

Part of becoming a good, well-integrated Mac OS X browser sometimes means
"breaking" features that are mediocre on all platforms in a cross-platform
browser in order to create a better implementation that fits well with the
targeted platform.  

Adding and maintaining multiple complex codepaths to please a few users who want
to switch back and forth constantly between native and non-native features will
lead to a consistency nightmare for the users (is this password in the Keychain
or the Firefox password manager?) and for developers, who have to keep checking
to ensure that a change didn't break *two* different implementations.

This bug has already been WONTFIXED once by the lead developer of Camion.  Do
not reopen it unless you have convinced all of the other main Camino developers
to overrule him (hint: it won't happen on this bug).

However, a RFE for a more robust (one-time) import of parts of the Firefox
profile is probably tenable.

Comment 5

[db]

Do you care to explain some of these improved features and why they are better?

And aren't there far more Mac-Firefox users than Camino - and wouldn't it make
sense to 'adhere' to the standard similar to how you, if you build a new word
processor today must be able to import MS Word documents?

Besides, there are users at, for example universities, that use several
platforms with one account (home directory) - if they use FF they can share
prefs etc, but Camino's 'incompatibility' probably reduces the number of Camino
users in such environments.

This is like aqua-emacs required it's own .emacs. I still think this smells NIH:-(