592479 - Improve the usability of profiles on the hard drive

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

(Note that this bug has absolutely nothing to do with the impending release of Firefox 4, I just wanted to get it filed since a number of these ideas have been on my mind recently.)

As more users start to set up Sync, and we potentially introduce multiple user accounts in Firefox (each set up to a Sync profile).  I would like us to make a few changes to our we surface individual profiles in the file system to improve their usability.

Dependent bugs would include things like:

-We zip the contents of the profile (with no compression) in order to make it a single file in the file system
-We give that file an extension, and associate that extension with Firefox (so that when you double click it Firefox opens loading that profile).  This has the side effect of making your Firefox data portable.
-We associate the file extension with an icon that represents a Firefox user
-We move any unique identifiers to be inside of the file, so that that we can name it using the user short name from sync, without any randomly generated text.

Note that this is slightly different from the new profile manager application that is currently being worked on, but if we made these changes that application would be generating profiles in this new format (and adding additional functionality, like remembering to launch them with a particular version of Firefox for testing).  Also that application wouldn't force each new profile created to be associated with a different Sync account (while Firefox would).

Even for machines with a single Firefox sync account, these changes would help for two different use cases:

-creating a backup of all of your browser data
-destroying all of your local browser data (and access to the Sync account) when you are about to give a computer away

We will likely want to provide in product UI for those two actions as well, but we should still provide a clean interface for users to directly manage these files in the file system.

Comment 1

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Another random thought, if someone was testing Firefox and using the separate profile manager application, could we store the version the profile is supposed to launch with in the profile itself, so that we could have portable profiles in case testers want to share them?

Also, I'm not sure to what extent our profiles are currently cross platform, and with Sync that isn't really much of an issues since you can move all of your browser data through the cloud, but if profiles are locked to a particular platform we should probably surface that information somehow.  Or ideally we would solve that issue by silently handling the error when someone tries to launch a profile from one platform on another, by using the Sync credentials, clearing the rest of the data, and re-creating the profile for that platform.

Comment 2

[Daniel C]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Also, I'm not sure to what extent our profiles are currently cross platform

There's bug 7067 (11 years old) and bug 58647 (10 years old) and the dependencies listed in each. Not sure how much is still relevant but I expect at least some of it is.

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The meta keyword is there, the bug doesn't depend on other bugs and there is no activity for 12 months.
:Dolske, maybe it's time to close this bug?

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The meta keyword is there, the bug doesn't depend on other bugs and there is no activity for 12 months.
:Dolske, maybe it's time to close this bug?

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I'm not sure if this is something we'd do or not, so making this an enhancement rather than a meta. Also shifting across to startup & profile system as that would seem to be a better place to consider it.

Comment 6

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

It's a great idea but would be a massive amount of work. We simply have too many different storage systems, each of which would have to be modified to support reading and writing data inside of an archive rather than directly to files. We'd probably end up writing some kind of virtual disk driver for each OS and no.