600740 - Firefox should have an option to "nuke" the profile

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Chris Lyon [:clyon]]

There isn't a good way for somebody to quit using Firefox sync. I know that we all want them to keep using it but in the case where somebody is using a public computer or loaner computer, it would be nice to have a button for them to delete their profile and clear everything in it. History, passwords, prefs, and bookmarks.

Comment 1

[Philipp von Weitershausen [:philikon]]

Quoting mconnor from bug 592911 comment 3 which I very much agree with:

  I don't think that "wipe my local data" is really properly scoped
  to the Sync UI.

On a public computer you really don't want to use the main profile, you would want to create a throw-away profile and then nuke it once you're done. This is even more true when Sync comes into play, but I think it's an independent issue. Sync might just make it more desirable to have UI for this.

Then again, we already have UI to add and remove profiles: the profile manager. It's just very inaccessible and hideous. I think the UX team has ideas for "branded" Firefox instances/profiles, so there's hope for a future Firefox version to have a very simple UI for this a la OS X Fast User Switching.

Comment 2

[Chris Lyon [:clyon]]

The purpose of this is really to give a single place to or even a menu for somebody to not use sync and to erase the data which has been copied to a given system. It should be easy and not "inaccessible and hideous"

It should not be "inaccessible and hideous" if it was part of the sync prefs UI.

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

To reiterate, I do not believe this is well scoped to the Sync UI.  If I sync down my passwords and log into sites, even if I delete the data I synced down, cookies and other data are not things that Sync touches, so we're still leaving stuff behind.  If we're deleting the whole profile, that is something that is much more properly scoped to the Privacy prefs in Firefox.

That said, we don't keep track of what we sync once we're done with it, and merging of data means that we have some really ambiguous/scary behaviours if we were to implement something as requested here. (i.e. you sync bookmarks, and we reconcile dupes... then you delete synced data and take the previously-existing bookmark with it).  In any case, I think this is the wrong place to put the UI, and it shouldn't be dependent on Sync.  The use case exists without Sync as well, and it would be better fulfilled with UI elsewhere.

IMO, temporary profiles and/or wiping all user data from a profile are both app-level features that should not depend on Sync in any way (though there's absolutely room for these features to be enhanced with Sync, of course).