788916 - Profile interoperability between OSes

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Renato Silva]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0
Build ID: 20120824154833




Expected results:

It would be nice if Firefox profiles could be shared between different OSes, for example Windows and Linux. This way, any change made to the profile in one OS would reflect the same way in the other after reboot. Also, it would be a more refined alternative to local Sync scenarios.

Configuration would be shared as much as possible. Add-ons would be able to declare themselves as OS-independent, that meaning they won't produce any OS-specific data in Firefox profile. Add-ons not following good interoperability practices would be somehow regarded badly in comparison to the others, for example like in the restart vs. restartless thing. Everything that cannot be shared would be kept in a separate area for each OS within the profile, organized easily so that one can determine which part is common and which one is OS-specific by just looking at the profile directory.

If possible, advanced and troubleshooting users should be able to make specific configurations local to the underlying OS, or generalize them back, at least from about:config. However, it would be a nice improvement even without this.

The main advantage is a more detailed alternative for local syncs in dual-booting scenarios. I think there are just too many details in a Firefox profile to make all of them sync-aware, and in fact, much of them are not handled by Sync, for example add-on preferences. I'm not aware on how hard would it be to implement, I just know someone told me Firefox isn't currently able to share profiles as described.

Comment 1

[Cork]

As long as your not using any binary extensions, you can copy a profile from ex. windows to linux just fine. What part is it you have problem with?