944976 - Metro/Desktop simultaneous use case

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Metro Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131125215016

Steps to reproduce:

I have just read at 

http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/155/

that the only one of the Metro/Desktop browsers will be allowed to run at the same time. 



Expected results:

Unfortunately, on my touch laptop, I use a mixture of both desktop and Metro apps. I've essentially shifted consumption (reading RSS, watching video, playing music, weather, Facebook, Twitter) into Metro, while the desktop is being used for creation (writing, email, active browsing in FF). 

My use case for FF Metro would be to open links from Metro other apps (say from an RSS article) while keeping the Desktop isolated for work purposes. It sounds that this will not be possible with the shared-profile design change.

Comment 1

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

Yes, this is an unfortunate trade-off:  Currently our profile system forces us to choose between sharing profile data or running both browsers at once.

Note that you can still use the Profile Manager to run desktop Firefox with a separate profile, which will let you run the desktop and metro browsers at the same time.  (Though we don't have a similar well-documented or supported way to switch profiles for the Metro browser.)

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

I guess it's OK if there are two separate profiles, even though the bookmarks won't be synced. The only thing I would like to stress is that, from my perspective of course, I would find it ideal if an option existed to make desktop applications only open the desktop browser with the desktop profile, while all metro applications would only open the metro browser with the metro profile.

Comment 4

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

Having separate profiles requires significant overhead for those of us who use mostly metro UI - to do anything meaningful with desktop UI one would need to either use sync (which is plain stupid on a single machine) or manually keep track of cookies, saved passwords, etc.

Comment 5

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

(In reply to Dmitrij D. Czarkoff from comment #4)
> Having separate profiles requires significant overhead for those of us who
> use mostly metro UI - to do anything meaningful with desktop UI one would
> need to either use sync (which is plain stupid on a single machine) or
> manually keep track of cookies, saved passwords, etc.

Just curious Dmitrij, what type of device do you use? Are you using the metro browser mostly via touch, or mouse/trackpad?

Comment 6

[Dmitrij D. Czarkoff]

I use metro browser on ordinary laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad EDGE E325) with no touch hardware. (Unfortunately Windows driver treats middle button of my touchpad as a modifier to turn trackpoint into 4-directional mouse wheel, so I have to use mouse.) Windows 8.1 is a secondary OS on this laptop, installed just because I find metro UI aesthetically pleasant - the only non-metro graphical apps I use are putty and "Command Prompt".

Comment 7

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Mass close of bugs in obsolete product https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350354