Fwd: Removal of the Profile Manager UI?
Henrik Skupin
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Removal of the Profile Manager UI?
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:09:09 +0100
From: Henrik Skupin <hsk...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.planning
While checking bug mail today I have seen a comment from Benjamin
Smedberg on bug 278860
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=278860) which is about the
confusing profile manager warning when a profile is already in use. I
was really upset when reading his statement in comment 91:
> In any case, I'm
> trying to remove the profile manager in bug 214675, so I think this problem
> will be mostly moot.
>From bug 214675:
> I want to do this for the 1.9.3 cycle. This removes a fair bit of complexity
> from nsAppRunner.cpp and related code. This will help make it possible to
> refactor all our startup code (XPCOM and toolkit) into a single place. It will
> also make it possible to re-add a well-designed profile system like dmills
> wants to do for Weave integration that doesn't require application restart.
Why do we want to remove the Profile Manager UI? It sounds insane, even
with the knowledge that we do not have any alternative in place. So I
have to ask: why is it useless? What about our user base? Do we know
that much about everyone that we can make such an assumption? I don't
think so. Instead having a private discussion on a bug we should talk
about that issue in the public.
Given my QA point of view I would have to say that:
The profile manager is a component of Firefox we use heavily for
testing. Most of us have a profile for each of our branches. Further
other profiles exist for release testing and simply the daily checks.
Given that existing profiles will be deleted and new ones created very
often. Without an UI handling multiple profiles across branches will be
a hassle because it would require us to have shortcuts for each and
every of those profiles multiplied with the amount of branches
installed. I do not think that everyone will handle profile data with
the file manager.
Given the amount of bugs we triage over time a high percentage of those
filed bugs we were able to solve after proposing ways like Safe Mode or
creating a fresh profile. Having no UI anymore for profile management
would make it harder for any user to handle their profiles.
Personally I have to use it a dozen of times per day while jumping
between Minefield, Namoroka, Shiretoko, Gran Paradiso, and official
releases. I believe that a huge amount of users seeing it the same way.
As already said above we shouldn't remove such a wide-spread feature
without having anything else in place. We even don't know anything about
the addressed profile system dmills wants to have and when it will be
available - if it will be available.
Please don't do this.
my2c,
--
Henrik Skupin
QA Execution Engineer
Mozilla Corporation