about:profiles and the new profile manager

[Andrea Marchesini]

Hi all,

This week I landed a set of patches to introduce 'about:profiles'.
This page shows the list of existing profiles and gives the possibility to
create new ones, delete them, rename them, change the default one.

I wanted to work on this feature because I think having multiple profiles
and manage them with a simple UI is extremely useful and it's important for
web developers who want to test a websites with different logins, people
who care about privacy and want to have different profiles for different
use-case, and so on.

This page/feature is not meant to be a replacement of containers:
containers have a completely different workflow, it's a major feature of
firefox and I want to see it enabled by default on nightly :)

I also landed a replacement of the existing ProfileManager, built on top of
about:profiles: instead having a XUL UI, we show a XUL browser element
rendering |about:profiles?manage|. This new profile manager offers the same
features of the previous one.

There are still a couple of open issues, and maybe more will come. But I'm
working on them and I'm having good feedback.

b

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

Looks promising.

Are you in touch with Noidart, the developer of Profilist (the other
profile switching add-on)?

Cheers,
David

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>

[Ben Kelly]

I really like being able to manage my profiles within a normal firefox
tab. Awesome!

The replacement for the ProfileManager probably needs some UX work,
though. It was not clear to me which profile was actually going to be
launched if I clicked the "Start Nightly" button.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Andrea Marchesini <amarc...@mozilla.com

[Andrea Marchesini]

>
>
> The replacement for the ProfileManager probably needs some UX work,
> though. It was not clear to me which profile was actually going to be
> launched if I clicked the "Start Nightly" button.
>
>

Right. This is one of the bug I'm working on (bug 1233032). The new UI has
been written but, definitely, and we still need some UX work.

[Jason Duell]

I think we need to compact the new UI. The old profile manager shows me up
to 5 profiles that I can simply click on to launch the browser. With the
new UI the info for the first profile fills up the whole popup window, so
launching other profiles now requires me to scroll down, then click. That
sounds minor (and in some sense it is) but 95% of the time the profile
manager is launched to select which profile to run (versus trying to find
where the profile is stored on disk, etc), so making that a slower
experience seems like a step backward.

It's great to see it running as a normal tab, though!

Do we have any plans to make Profile manager more prominent in our user
experience? I've used it for years now to keep one instance of firefox
running with work stuff, and one for personal use. But it remains a buried
secret, when it's really handy for a lot of use cases (people sharing a
computer, etc). I know a lot of people who wind up using different
browsers to achieve the same thing, which seems like a waste.

Jason

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Jason

[Tanvi Vyas]

Very cool baku! Thank you! I just tried it out, and although I'm sure
there are many things we could do to enhance the UI/UX, this is much
better than what we had before.

On 12/18/15 9:17 AM, Andrea Marchesini wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This week I landed a set of patches to introduce 'about:profiles'.
> This page shows the list of existing profiles and gives the possibility to
> create new ones, delete them, rename them, change the default one.
>
> I wanted to work on this feature because I think having multiple profiles
> and manage them with a simple UI is extremely useful and it's important for
> web developers who want to test a websites with different logins, people
> who care about privacy and want to have different profiles for different
> use-case, and so on.
>
> This page/feature is not meant to be a replacement of containers:
> containers have a completely different workflow, it's a major feature of
> firefox and I want to see it enabled by default on nightly :)
>
> I also landed a replacement of the existing ProfileManager, built on top of
> about:profiles: instead having a XUL UI, we show a XUL browser element
> rendering |about:profiles?manage|. This new profile manager offers the same
> features of the previous one.
>
> There are still a couple of open issues, and maybe more will come. But I'm
> working on them and I'm having good feedback.
>
> b

[shorl...@mozilla.com]

Hi Andrea,

This looks like a promising effort to improve profile management.

I work on the on the Firefox UX team and I do have some concerns about the current design.

Can you tell us some more about next phases of this work before it would go into the product?

Have you consulted anyone from the Firefox front-end or Firefox UX team about this already?

Thanks!
- Stephen

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 12/18/2015 4:07 PM, shorl...@mozilla.com wrote:
>
> Hi Andrea,
>
> This looks like a promising effort to improve profile management.
>
> I work on the on the Firefox UX team and I do have some concerns about the current design.
>
> Can you tell us some more about next phases of this work before it would go into the product?
>
> Have you consulted anyone from the Firefox front-end or Firefox UX team about this already?

As it stands, this is not intended to be product code and so I
specifically advised Andrea not to spend UX/product time on this. It is
still a strict replacement for the old profile manager code which was
very difficult to maintain.

It's unlikely that we'd use this code as a base for any production
version of multiple-user Firefox.

--BDS

[Stephen Horlander]

On Friday, December 18, 2015 at 4:52:00 PM UTC-5, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> As it stands, this is not intended to be product code and so I
> specifically advised Andrea not to spend UX/product time on this. It is
> still a strict replacement for the old profile manager code which was
> very difficult to maintain.
>
> It's unlikely that we'd use this code as a base for any production
> version of multiple-user Firefox.
>
> --BDS

I am not sure I understand. Does "not intended to be product code" mean that this won't be riding the trains and shipping in a general release of Firefox?

- Stephen

[Bobby Holley]

I believe he means that the current profile manager isn't really
user-facing, since it needs to be enabled on the command line (at least
once): http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager

The current profile manager certainly doesn't meet our UX standards, so we
shouldn't try to make the replacement meet them either. That being said, we
should make sure it's no _less_ usable than the old one.

bholley

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 2:09 PM, Stephen Horlander <shorl...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

[Kartikaya Gupta]

Note that there are add-ons such as "Profile Switcher" which allow you
to display the profile manager dialog without touching the
command-line. I don't know if that qualifies as "user facing" or not.
It's certainly an advanced user feature that most people will never
see.

kats

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 5:15 PM, Bobby Holley <bobby...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe he means that the current profile manager isn't really
> user-facing, since it needs to be enabled on the command line (at least
> once): http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager
>
> The current profile manager certainly doesn't meet our UX standards, so we
> shouldn't try to make the replacement meet them either. That being said, we
> should make sure it's no _less_ usable than the old one.
>
> bholley
>
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 2:09 PM, Stephen Horlander <shorl...@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
>

[Stephen Horlander]

On Friday, December 18, 2015 at 5:16:00 PM UTC-5, Bobby Holley wrote:
> I believe he means that the current profile manager isn't really
> user-facing, since it needs to be enabled on the command line (at least
> once): http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager

It's true that it isn't a feature that is widely accessible, especially due to it's "hidden" nature. We do however have a support article on how to enable it on SuMo (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles) and we recommend enabling it to developers on MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Multiple_Firefox_Profiles). In addition to that there are many 3rd party websites that illustrate how to enable it. You can find them by searching for "Firefox Profiles".

So it is still a shipping feature that at least some amount of people will encounter.

> The current profile manager certainly doesn't meet our UX standards, so we
> shouldn't try to make the replacement meet them either. That being said, we
> should make sure it's no _less_ usable than the old one.

I might disagree that we should take the status quo as a reason to not do better ;) But yes, my concerns are mostly around regressions. In its current state I think there are several ways the new profile chooser is less usable than the old one.

- Stephen

[noit...@gmail.com]

Thanks Yoric for the note here! :)

Hi @Andrea, I was also working on HTML version since I heard that XUL is going to go away soon. I used React. Here is a preview of the GUI, the filter feature (by default profiles are sorted alpha-numerically ascending, that can be changed in the options page) (preferences can be set to affect across all profiles, or just the current one).

Heres a quick screencast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziTbU9RzZYU

Also @Andrea are we going to change how profiles.ini is used?


I used react in html, and I've been working on getting react to work in the xul scope so I can drop this menu item brainlessly into the main menu panel as in Profilist v1 and v2.

Thanks I hope I can work closely with you here.

[Ehsan Akhgari]

On 2015-12-18 5:43 PM, Stephen Horlander wrote:
>> The current profile manager certainly doesn't meet our UX standards, so we
>> shouldn't try to make the replacement meet them either. That being said, we
>> should make sure it's no _less_ usable than the old one.
>
> I might disagree that we should take the status quo as a reason to not do better ;) But yes, my concerns are mostly around regressions. In its current state I think there are several ways the new profile chooser is less usable than the old one.

Please file bugs for those. We'll definitely fix
any regressions from the current UI. (And I would say that if you have
further ideas for fixes that are not mere regressions you should file
those too!)

Note that there have been a few bugs already filed and some of them have
been fixed on inbound. At least some of those bugs can be found in the
dependency list of bug 1179129.

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

In that case, perhaps the first thing to land and let ride the trains
would be a clean profile API to let add-on developers (including Andrea
and GoFaster) experiment with implementing prototype profile managers?

Cheers,
David

On 18/12/15 22:51, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> As it stands, this is not intended to be product code and so I
> specifically advised Andrea not to spend UX/product time on this. It is
> still a strict replacement for the old profile manager code which was
> very difficult to maintain.
>
> It's unlikely that we'd use this code as a base for any production
> version of multiple-user Firefox.
>
> --BDS
>

[Philip Chee]

On 19/12/2015 14:52, David Rajchenbach-Teller wrote:
> In that case, perhaps the first thing to land and let ride the
> trains would be a clean profile API to let add-on developers
> (including Andrea and GoFaster) experiment with implementing
> prototype profile managers?

What's wrong with the current API?

Phil

--
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>, <phili...@gmail.com>
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ http://xsidebar.mozdev.org
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

Oh, do we have a clean profile API already? If so, I missed it when I
was looking for it, a few years ago.

[Andrea Marchesini]

Hi Stephen,

Can you tell us some more about next phases of this work before it would go
> into the product?
>

Mainly fixing regressions and improving the usability.

> Have you consulted anyone from the Firefox front-end or Firefox UX team
> about this already?
>

Jeff Griffiths, but there is not a serious plan about improving the UX of
the ProfileManager, yet.

b

[Andrea Marchesini]

> Also @Andrea are we going to change how profiles.ini is used?
>
>

Hi,

no, I'm not going to.

Thanks I hope I can work closely with you here.
>
>

Why not! I just want to receive more feedback about what we want to achieve
from a UX point of view before changing the existing code.
b

[Justin Dolske]

On 12/18/15 1:51 PM, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:

>> Have you consulted anyone from the Firefox front-end or Firefox UX
>> team about this already?
>
> As it stands, this is not intended to be product code and so I
> specifically advised Andrea not to spend UX/product time on this. It is
> still a strict replacement for the old profile manager code which was
> very difficult to maintain.

I think it still would have been good to have some UX input on the
design. It's used commonly enough that we can't drop it, and so it's
worth giving it some UX attention as part of a quality product.

That doesn't mean it has to be a large project; it's fair to place
bounds on the work (like making it a strict replacement for the old
code, and not expanding scope). I think our UX team has been good about
working within such limitations when needed, and even proposing
well-scoped improvements that would otherwise have been missed.

(This holds for any piece of UI, really. It's always worth reaching out
to UX.)

Justin

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 12/18/2015 5:09 PM, Stephen Horlander wrote:
> I am not sure I understand. Does "not intended to be product code" mean that this won't be riding the trains and shipping in a general release of Firefox?

No. It means that, like the old profile manager, about:config, and other
things like that, it's not intended for use by end-users.

One of the things I'm most concerned about with about:profiles is that
it will be easier for users to discover it, but the technical benefits
of removing a lot of the no-profile gecko startup paths and complex
restart logic will make this a nice win overall.

--BDS

[yal...@ucr.edu]

Thanks Andrea. I had three issues, maybe you might know how to address these:
1) Any ideas on how to restart into another build? For example if currently running in nightly.app/exe, and I want to restart that profile into develeoper.app/exe, the restart mechanism only launches into the same profile, so I had trouble with that.

2) On mac os x, when create system launcher it breaks the update mechanism - reason this is needed is because otherwise you cant "keep in dock", "custom icons", and some other stuff - http://i.imgur.com/XfRDaw8.png --- a) I copy the Firefox.app, Firefox.app/Contents b) I then copy as "symlink" the Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS, and Firefox.app/Contents/Resources c) I then create in the origianl MacOS folder a shell script d) In original resources folder I create a new icon specific for this profile e) I then copy over the plist.info but change the execute line to the new one created in "c" and icon to the new one created in "d". --- Now this works, however updates fail to happen, it always tries to download it. The issue is these special paths no should point to original directory as I "symlink"ed it, however they are pointing to the new location. I am going to try "alias"'ing them instead of "symlink"ing them and see if that fixes it. But would you happen to know? If "alias" method doesn't work either, would we be able to land a patch so that it tests if its a symlink/alias and gets the original path?

These are the special paths that get overridden - UpdRootD, XREExeF, XREAppDist, DefRt, PrfDef, profDef, ProfDefNoLoc, ARes, AChrom, APlugns, SrchPlugns, XPIClnupD, CurProcD, XCurProcD, XpcomLib, GreD, GreBinD, ProfLDS, ProfLD. Overriding them to point to the original path with this method does not fix it - http://stackoverflow.com/a/28357788/1828637

3) The last one was caching issues when cloning a profile. I discovered jpm uses firefoxl-profile-js module, so I'm going to try that - https://github.com/saadtazi/firefox-profile-js/issues/56 - but do you have any experience with cloning profiles?

[Mark Finkle]

As work on this feature continues, I think we want to block the code and UI
from shipping in Firefox for Android. Can you look into ways to stop the
toolkit code, strings and UI from getting packaged for Android?

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Andrea Marchesini <amarc...@mozilla.com

> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This week I landed a set of patches to introduce 'about:profiles'.
> This page shows the list of existing profiles and gives the possibility to
> create new ones, delete them, rename them, change the default one.
>
> I wanted to work on this feature because I think having multiple profiles
> and manage them with a simple UI is extremely useful and it's important for
> web developers who want to test a websites with different logins, people
> who care about privacy and want to have different profiles for different
> use-case, and so on.
>
> This page/feature is not meant to be a replacement of containers:
> containers have a completely different workflow, it's a major feature of
> firefox and I want to see it enabled by default on nightly :)
>
> I also landed a replacement of the existing ProfileManager, built on top of
> about:profiles: instead having a XUL UI, we show a XUL browser element
> rendering |about:profiles?manage|. This new profile manager offers the same
> features of the previous one.
>
> There are still a couple of open issues, and maybe more will come. But I'm
> working on them and I'm having good feedback.
>
> b

[john....@gmail.com]

Hey all, I filed this last week, but didn't assign it. I've been unable to open nightly at all since the new profile manager launched.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1235832

[Andrea Marchesini]

Hey all, I filed this last week, but didn't assign it. I've been unable to
> open nightly at all since the new profile manager launched.
>
>

Hi John,
I asked your a question on bugzilla. Can you take a look? Thanks.
If you prefer we can talk on IRC. My nick name is 'baku'.
bye
b

[Karl Dubost]

Andrea,

Le 19 déc. 2015 à 02:17, Andrea Marchesini <amarc...@mozilla.com> a écrit :
> This week I landed a set of patches to introduce 'about:profiles'.

Where is the initial bug?
With the change, we got a couple of orphaned bugs related to the new profile manager (old-new, I should say. it's gone from nightly, back to the old one.)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1235832
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1235295
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1235284

--
Karl Dubost, Mozilla
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/moz

[Andrea Marchesini]

Hi, I reverted the changes about the new ProfileManager and I'm
collaborating with Bram for a better UX.
about:profiles is still there and you can use it to manage your profiles
once FF is running.
I marked as duplicates all of those bugs.

The new profileManager will be implemented here: bug 1240022
b

[noit...@gmail.com]

Hey Andrea, I have a cross platform (almost release) beta ready. I uploaded it to AMO as beta:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/

Please scroll down to the bottom of AMO listing and install Development Channel

http://i.imgur.com/GJkQt56.png

http://i.imgur.com/gNhLIv6.png

After install please navigate to about:profilist?html to use/see it in action.

To access the options page, please go to about:profilist - from here you can create desktop shortcuts.

One massive issue is something I'll have to submit a patch to Firefox for. It's on Mac: Anything that is launched from the Profilist menu or a desktop shortcut created by Profilist, has some internal paths that are wrong. Each launcher is an app bundle which consists of symlinks to the original Firefox app bundle. The issue is Firefox isn't reading through those symlinks. But it works pretty decently, the update mechanism is broken, but I hope to try to get a patch in on Firefox for this.

Here's a screenshot of it in action: http://i.imgur.com/jAimWMb.png

[Andrea Marchesini]

This is awesome!
What about if you file a bug and you CC/NI me and :bram? We can continue
the discussion on bugzilla.
Thanks!
b

[noit...@gmail.com]

Thanks Andrea :) Ok will put it up on Bugzilla :)

[noit...@gmail.com]

Hi Andrea I created it here - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247988 :)