Make Nightly use a different profile directory?

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Make Nightly use a different profile directory? Anton Kovalyov 17/07/13 10:38
Hi,

The Firefox Developer Tools team (and I'm sure many other teams working on Desktop Firefox) would really love if Nightly adoption rate was increased. One way to achieve that is to follow what Chrome did with Canary and allow running Nightly simultaneously with other instances of Firefox without manually creating and choosing profiles. AFAIK, right now all channels use the same Application Support/Firefox directory (on my Mac at least) so my proposal is to change that to FirefoxNightly.

The main benefit, as I see it, is allowing web devs to use Nightly alongside their normal Firefox without too much trouble (it is a pain to run Firefox with -p on a Mac without additional tools).

Thoughts?


Anton
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Re: Make Nightly use a different profile directory? Jared Wein 17/07/13 11:05
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Anton Kovalyov" <an...@mozilla.com>
> To: "Firefox Dev" <firef...@mozilla.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 1:38:25 PM
> Subject: Make Nightly use a different profile directory?
>
> Hi,
>
> The Firefox Developer Tools team (and I'm sure many other teams working on
> Desktop Firefox) would really love if Nightly adoption rate was increased.
> One way to achieve that is to follow what Chrome did with Canary and allow
> running Nightly simultaneously with other instances of Firefox without
> manually creating and choosing profiles. AFAIK, right now all channels use
> the same Application Support/Firefox directory (on my Mac at least) so my
> proposal is to change that to FirefoxNightly.
>
> The main benefit, as I see it, is allowing web devs to use Nightly alongside
> their normal Firefox without too much trouble (it is a pain to run Firefox
> with -p on a Mac without additional tools).
>
> Thoughts?

I agree. There are many users who don't think multiple versions of Firefox can be run simultaneously. I would even say that Firefox Aurora should be included in this separate profile business as well, as most of my webdev friends use Firefox Aurora to test out new features but dislike having to close Firefox first.

Thank you for bringing this up Anton.

Cheers,
Jared
Re: Make Nightly use a different profile directory? David Rajchenbach-Teller 17/07/13 11:08
Very good idea.

We could have a dialog during first launch offering to either share the
profile (in which case both versions cannot be executed simultaneously)
or launch with a different profile (in which case they can).

Cheers,
 David
--
David Rajchenbach-Teller, PhD
 Performance Team, Mozilla
Re: Make Nightly use a different profile directory? Matt Brubeck 17/07/13 11:23
I think this is a good idea.  On Android we already use separate
profiles per channel (because Android apps do not share data by
default).  It has definite benefits for testing in multiple versions,
and the disadvantages have not proven to be major obstacles in practice.

Firefox Sync makes managing multiple profiles less painful.  Making Sync
setup easier (which we already need to do for a number of reasons)
should let users benefit from this more easily.
Re: Make Nightly use a different profile directory? Jared Wein 17/07/13 11:39
Although I'm not sure how this could be implemented for current users. Maybe upon upgrade, users of Nightly and Aurora could be prompted (yikes!) to ask if they want to fork their Nightly/Aurora profile or continue to use the same one?

Just a thought,
Jared
Re: Make Nightly use a different profile directory? Anton Kovalyov 17/07/13 11:57