512998 - reset all settings to default

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 789663

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[brandt24]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090827 Shredder/3.0b4pre

I would appreciate the option to reset all of the default settings of TB.

Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
Right now it is not possbile to reset all of the settings, you can reset only some and have to search for it from different places.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

confirming RFE.

Comment 2

[brandt24]

Anybody?

Comment 3

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

The work around to this right now is creating a new profile.  I realize that creating a new profile isn't what you're asking for but that's the best Thunderbird can do at the moment.

see: http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/profile

Comment 4

[brandt24]

I completely understand. I was just wondering if that would be a difficult thing to achive so that if somebody messes up their settings, they can return to the status quo with just a click of a button.

Comment 5

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Thanks for understanding.  Oh and actually if you follow the diagnostics steps you can achieve this without creating a new profile but by killing your existing settings.  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Thunderbird

I'm not sure how much work it would be to do this.  I have to imagine it's feasible as I think Firefox has something like this for safemode.  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode#Safe_Mode_options_in_Firefox

Though I don't think there is quite enough time to get this done by Thunderbird 3 release, perhaps the next one.

Comment 6

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

It's feasible, but it needs to either depend on a bug (that may or may not already exist) to remove all account, server, and identity prefs from prefs and store them somewhere else, or whoever ports the Fx safe mode dialog will need to write some code to back up pref branches and then restore from them - Fx doesn't have any prefs it really cares about, so it just calls the prefs service's function to clear all user prefs, which for us would amount to "Reset all user prefs to default and delete all your accounts and servers and identities, too, surprise!"

(And then someone will want a way to reset all account prefs other than the ones that they won't want reset, and the question of which are which there will be quite fun.)