655667 - Provide a super-easy way for Web developers to run Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Firefox side-by-side

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, defect)

Description

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Steps to reproduce:
 1) Install Firefox, Aurora, Nightly and Beta
 2) Try to run them all at the same time.

Actual results:
Trying to run any two of Firefox, Aurora, Nightly or Beta at the same time produces a dialog on Mac that says that only one instance can run at a time. On other platforms, a new window is opened in whichever version was running first.

Expected results:
When the user hasn't switched channels using the channel switcher but has manually downloaded and installed multiple channel versions, expected there to be a super-simple way to run the apps from the different channels side-by-side with one profile per channel.

Additional info:
The HTML5 parser caused multiple regressions in Firefox 4 compared to Firefox 3.6 where the regressions had simple one-or-two-line fixes and the regressions were considered serious by the Web authors whose apps/sites were affected (bug 651441 was in 12 betas, bug 645115 also seems to have been in 12 betas and bug 642908 was in 4 betas). Since the fixes were so simple, these bugs could have easily been fixed in the beta cycle if the bugs had been discovered and reported in time. Instead what happened was that it was possible for a bug to be in the tree through multiple betas without getting reported only to get reported once the "final" release was out.

Since evidently our own processes are unable to catch all regressions, I think we should make it super-easy for Web developers to pay attention before a release is out so that regressions affecting their sites/apps can be fixed before Firefox hits the release channel. Web developers generally want to run the release builds so that they use what most of their user base is using and they use a version where Firebug works. When Aurora (etc.) don't run side-by-side with the release Firefox, Web developers don't bother testing in Aurora.

To make it easy for Web developer to help us not to break their stuff, I think Aurora (etc.) when installed without using the channel switcher should create a separate profile for each channel so that e.g. Aurora would behave as if it was a fully-functional app called Aurora alongside an app called Firefox instead of being a special version of Firefox.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

At this point, this requires active UI design and a complete feature writeup, which is outside the scope of a bug. I have WONTFIXed several different versions of this bug before, and I don't think that channel switching has changed the fundamental nature of the problem, which is that most users expect their data to still be present. Marking INCOMPLETE for now, and please bring this up to product drivers and the UI group for a complete specification before reopening.

Comment 2

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

It would be interesting to know what reaction has been from Chrome Canary users, since they have a split profile as well.  (Why do we believe that testing users expect this, and would expect it in the face of better description?  How will we know if that changes?  Maybe that's in the other bugs, apologies if so.)

That said, I tend to agree with Linus Torvalds on this: until you call it .0, most people won't bother testing or reporting.

Comment 3

[Mounir Lamouri (:mounir)]

Isn't it what Firefox Mobile is already doing? I have Firefox, Firefox Beta, Aurora and Nightly and AFAICT, they all use separate profiles. So why this inconsistency?

Comment 4

[Paul [pwd]]

Being that we have Sync, couldn't we simply sync data to be shared across profiles that way and default to independent stand-alone profiles?