656849 - Provide "restart with clean profile" beside "restart in safe mode"

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[Carlo Alberto Ferraris]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

In the help menu of fx4 there's the new restart in safe mode command. To troubleshoot problems/bugs, it may make sense to provide also a "restart with clean profile" command, that would restart firefox on a new, empty profile. At shutdown, either the old profile should be silently swapped back in or a popup should come up asking if the user wants to keep the new profile or if it wants to revert to the old one.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

We have never officially supported multiple profiles and in one of the upcoming versions of Firefox the profile manager will go away and will be replaced by an external application. A feature like this could leave users on another profile and they don't know how to switch back. Also compared to our overall user base we only have helped a fraction of users with that proposal. Probably a good candidate for the extensions land.

Comment 2

[Carlo Alberto Ferraris]

(In reply to comment #1)
> We have never officially supported multiple profiles and in one of the
> upcoming versions of Firefox the profile manager will go away and will be
> replaced by an external application.

I'm not talking about using multiple profiles. I'm talking about troubleshooting problems that may arise, i.e. streamlining what the official troubleshooting guide says: https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Basic%20Troubleshooting#w_8-
make-a-new-profile

> A feature like this could leave users
> on another profile and they don't know how to switch back. 

That's why I said that firefox, when closing a session in this "clean profile mode" should either automatically revert to the old profile or ask the user if they want, for the next session, A) to go back to the old profile, B) keep the new one temporarily (i.e. keep the old, but start again in "clean profile mode" with the current clean one) or C) deleting the old one and just keeping the new one. (as a side note, we would probably need some kind of profile data migration facility - maybe using Sync?)

> Also compared to
> our overall user base we only have helped a fraction of users with that
> proposal. Probably a good candidate for the extensions land.

As I envision this, it would serve the same purpose of safe mode (i.e. troubleshooting problems with extensions or with firefox) so I guess you could say it has the same "dignity" of the "restart in safe mode" command. Hence my proposal.

Comment 3

[Vlad [QA]]

Reporter, considering comment1, can you please change the status of this bug to Resolved Invalid. thx

Comment 4

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Reporter, considering comment1, can you please change the status of this bug
> to Resolved Invalid. thx

See the keyword field. We are still waiting for UX feedback. I wouldn't close it afront.

Comment 5

[Carlo Alberto Ferraris]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Reporter, considering comment1, can you please change the status of this bug
> to Resolved Invalid. thx

As I already replied, comment 1 completely missed my point. This is not meant to be an official endorsement of multiple profiles but merely a troubleshooting aid, following the _official_ guidelines that can be found in the SUMO link in comment 2.

Comment 6

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

This is somewhat related to a new feature[1] except that it's not meant for temporary troubleshooting because we don't plan to give an option to get back your old data.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Support/Firefox_Features/Clean_up_user_profile