591578 - RFC: Please make creating of user profiles less confusing in 4.0 than it was in 3.X

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Andreas Eibach]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b4) Gecko/20100818 Firefox/4.0b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b4) Gecko/20100818 Firefox/4.0b4

enhancement, no bug, see below

Reproducible: Always




This is NOT a bug report.
It's a sort of RFC to make the final 4.0 better than 3.0 ever was.

It's just a major annoyance that I've experienced in both 2.X and 3.X versions through all those years. I just kept quiet about it because FF will always be WIP, so I expected something to happen in this section!
But nothing happened, ever.

To put it bluntly, for newbies (as which I sometimes act myself, too, to understand problems that new users might run into), creating user profiles is just a NIGHTMARE, especially if you decide to put the user profile somewhere else than a Micro$oft tool would do it (i. e. everything on the C:\ drive)

The UI is much too less intuitive, even though you might think differently about it.

We'll start from the beginning, step by step.

1. firefox.exe --profilemanager
2. "Create Profile"
3. "Next"
4. Enter new profile name: <whatever you wish>

"You user settings, preferences and other user-related data will be stored in:"

5. "Choose Folder..."
6. NOW PRETEND YOU ARE A NEWBIE and just choose your folder, as you would do with any other software, e. g. D:\FFProfiles. 

However, what the new user thinks is:

It will work like 1000 other kinds of Windows software, too.

"Sure thing, Firefox will store the profile into D:\FFProfiles\<whatever you wish>".

WRONG !!!

FF will put ALL of your data DIRECTLY in D:\FFProfiles.
User clicks "Finish", and thinks everything is all right!

Now imagine the new user has a girlfriend, using his PC on another account.
Surely he wants to do a profile for her as well.
AGAIN, HE IS A NEW USER.
He's no tech-savvy person that thinks it's the easiest thing of the world to remember the "Create New Folder..." button which FF provides on the "Choose Folder..." dialog.

So, what will happen?
He'll do a profile for her, and ASSUME it would be created in 

D:\FFProfiles\<girlfriend's_own_profile>

Again WRONG!
Firefox will mercilessly OVERWRITE her boyfriend's data with hers!
Everything will go into the root of D:\FFProfiles\.

So ...

Either make it a standard behavior, that if ...

- user enters a profile name
AND
- user chooses a folder on another location

the profile will be stored in 
<chosen folder>\<profile name> instead of cramming all of it into the root of <chosen folder> as 2.X / 3.X did it!!

EVEN MORE HAZARDS:

THREE users are using this machine, one tech-savvy, the other isn't.

- The tech-savvy one creates his profile in
E:\UserProfilesFirefox\, CLICKS THE NEW FOLDER, and all perfect, his new profile data is kept in E:\UserProfilesFirefox\techSavvyGuy.

- The non-tech-savvy one learns from the tech-savvy one the following wish: "I'd prefer that all our profiles be stored into E:\UserProfilesFirefox".

"OK," the other answers, and in "Choose Folder", he selects "E:\UserProfilesFirefox", BUT DOES NOT click "New Folder", but instead just clicks "OK".

Sure thing! Firefox will now keep the techie's data in E:\UserProfilesFirefox\techSavvyGuy, but the other guy's data in E:\UserProfilesFirefox !!

NOW A DEVASTATING THING MAY HAPPEN.

Think that the non-tech-savvy guy gets tired of Firefox, wants to use the browser with the red oval O henceforth, and says "OK, privacy rules! Let's delete all my profile data".

You guessed it.

FIREFOX WILL NOW DELETE EVERYTHING, including the tech-savvy-guy's data which is in the subdirectory!!

The techie will be very happy if he has a backup.

So you see, how dangerous it can be to share a PC if the UI allows you to purge another user's profile with your own one, because FF gladly puts user data in the specified root directory instead of root\individual_subdir.

OK, that's enough now, sorry for the horribly long post.
But maybe it will bring up new ideas to make 4.0 "idiot-proof" =)

OVER.

Comment 1

[Andreas Eibach]

TWO users, not three, wanted to do a three-user example first, but decided against (no need).