381139 - Need different warning for profile RO, in use and missing. Confusing "Firefox cannot use ..." / "Thunderbird cannot use the profile "xx" because it is in use." error dialog if profile directory is read-only. (was: "Thunderbird is already running...")

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[raph]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; fr; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.0 (20070326)

When launching Thunderbird, if the profile is on a network share and if the share is mounted read-only, Thunderbird shows the message "Thunderbird is already running...", when clicking OK it exits.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Laucnh Thunderbird and create a profile on a network drive.
2. Close thunderbird.
3. Set network share as read-only.
4. Launch Thunderbird.
Actual Results:  
Thunderbird tells that an instance of it is already running.

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should show a warning indicating that there is a problem accessing the profile, not that it is already running.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

See also bug 278860 for missing profiles.

Comment 2

[Zvi Devir]

Confirmed on Linux system with R/O filesystem. 

Comment 3

[[e-mail]]

Found this for Thunderbird on Windows too.

Additionally Thunderbird does not start if you just delete "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Thunderbird". Same error message. Rebooting your system as adviced does *not* help!

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Current error dialog is perhaps better, "Thunderbird cannot use the profile "xx" because it is in use.", but is still incorrect if folder is read-only.

Comment 5

[Daniela Waranie]

13 years later profile directory issues on Thunderbird launch (most recent version) is still lacking user dialogs.

Also happens if you use Windows10 and Linux (e.g. Ubuntu 19.10) on the same PC. In my case with 2 disks.
When i shutdown Win10 with normal Windows-START-button-process, then Win10 does a hibernate by default. This leads to a read-only mounted drive in Ubuntu 19.10. My Linux Thunderbird has a profile stored on that read-only mounted disk. When i launch Thunderbird then i do not see a GUI, never see a GUI, no matter how long i wait. If i try to launch Thunderbird a second time, i will get the warning that Thunderbird is still running. Feedback to the user about the read-only issue of the profile directory is missing on first launch of Thunderbird.

Only if i shutdown windows 10 by telling it not to hibernate, only then i can work with my disk in linux in read-write mode.

Thunderbird should show a dialog, when profile is in read-only directory instead of being silent. Maybe with an option to select another profile or to close thunderbird and a link to a web-help-page about further troubleshooting.

Comment 6

[Yufan You [:ouuan]]

I also faced this issue. I'm using profile-sync-daemon. It creates a symlink to /dev/null in place of the profile directory at device startup, and then replaces it with a symlink to the actual profile directory. During the time window when the profile directory points to /dev/null, Firefox reports "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile" instead of the actual permission error.