763135 - Windows 7 jumplist should respect given command line parameters, notably "-profile".

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 844660

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[bat38]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0
Build ID: 20120601045813

Steps to reproduce:

When starting Firefox with a shortcut similar to "C:\SomeInstallationDirectory\firefox.exe -profile AProfileButNotTheDefaultOne -no-remote -win7appid SomeUniqueAppId", the jumplist items do not behave as expected.


Actual results:

The firefox process is properly startetd and the tabs of the given profile are properly restored. But clicking on either "New Tab" or "New Window" in the Windows 7 jumplist opens a new window with the tabs of the default profile restored; the given "-profile" command line parameter is apparently ignored by the jumplist entries. Taskmgr thus lists a second firefox process; it has only the "-browser" command line argument given, but neither of the aforementioned "-profile", "-no-remote" or "-win7appid" arguments.


Expected results:

In my opinion, the jumplist entries should respect given command line arguments, especially a given "-profile" command line parameter and use its profile instead of the default one.

Comment 1

[John David Galt]

Just before Firefox 3.0, some irresponsible person made a half-baked change to command-line processing that resulted in all command line arguments being disabled when running on Windows.  I complained about it at the time in bug 355889 comment 12, and was told to shut up or else (see later comments in that bug).

Comment 2

[bat38]

Well, after digging around a bit, it seems that command line parameter handling on windows generally does not work very well and as expected, even without jumplists, and is chronically under-documented: 

Since at least the Y2K "-help" and "-version" return output only if piped, e.g. via "| more". (see for example https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26761 )

The piped "-help" output is neither localized nor alphabetically ordered nor is it complete: There are some parameters that somewhat work but are not documented here, e.g. "-width", "-height", "-profile" (which must not be confused with "-P" nor "-ProfileManager"). However, http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments lists all of them. A bit more complete and accurate seems to be https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Command_Line_Options , although even this list lists some arguments by name only, omitting any description. http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/command-line-args.html is another source containing info about command line parameters, but is apparently rather outdated.

So playing around a bit, I got the impression that "-height" and "-width" are obviously overruled by the height and width of the restored session, thus working as expected only in conjunction with e.g. "-new-window" or with settings set in a way that the last session is not restored. 

Although "-console" and "-UILocale" is listed in the output of the "-help" parameter, it apparently does nothing (at least at Win7).

Bookmark keywords do not work at all as command line arguments (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166534 )

Taking all this into consideration, I doubt that it ever will be a joy using firefox command line parameters in conjunction with Windows 7 jumplists.

Comment 3

[Don Kleppinger]

Bug 942938 may also be related