In Firefox 65 we intend to ship two new features to help prevent user
frustration caused by using profiles created by newer versions of Firefox.

Why

Firefox stores all of its settings in the user’s profile and unless certain
command line arguments are used Firefox always launches with the same
profile. Periodically as Firefox upgrades it makes changes to the settings
that can render the profile unusable by earlier versions of Firefox. This
can cause anything from certain features of Firefox being broken after a
downgrade to Firefox crashing on startup.

To protect against this two new features will be landing in Nightly soon.

Dedicated Profiles Per Install

A common cause of users switching between different versions of Firefox is
having Firefox installed multiple times. This most often happens when users
have different channels installed at the same time like ESR and Release. It
is a common request to be able to run the different installs at the same
time. In Firefox 35 this was made possible for the developer edition by
giving it a dedicated profile. The new dedicated profiles per install
feature extends this and will give every install of Firefox on the computer
a dedicated profile by default.

Users will be able to run different installs of Firefox simultaneously.
Each will use a different profile for its settings. Upgrading an install of
Firefox will keep it using the same settings.

We’re tracking work on this feature in bug 1474285.

Profile Downgrade Protection

For cases where users manually downgrade an install of Firefox or attempt
to forcefully use an older version of Firefox with a newer profile the
profile downgrade protection feature will now tell the user that the
profile is too new to use with this Firefox giving them the option to
create a new profile to use or to quit.

We’re tracking work on this feature in bug 1455707.

Developer Implications

As developers it is quite common to switch between different builds for
example when testing different built versions of Firefox and doing
regression testing. To support these use-cases a new command line argument
“--allow-downgrade” will allow skipping the downgrade protection.

Conclusions

While some users may be impacted by this change we believe that most users
will be unaffected and those that are will see less problems caused by
downgrades than previously. This will give us the ability to ignore the
possibility of downgrades when implementing new features and fixing bugs
going forwards. Being able to make the assumption that this code works as
designed will allow us flexibility in other changes downstream.

These are fantastic changes, I'm very excited to see we're finally tackling
these hard problems.  Thanks a lot to everyone who helped make them happen.
> _______________________________________________
> firefox-dev mailing list
> firef...@mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev
>


--
Ehsan

Awesome!

> On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 3:32 PM Dave Townsend <dtow...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> > For cases where users manually downgrade an install of Firefox or attempt
> > to forcefully use an older version of Firefox with a newer profile the
> > profile downgrade protection feature will now tell the user that the
> > profile is too new to use with this Firefox giving them the option to
> > create a new profile to use or to quit.

If you have multiple channels installed, and have them all start with
-P for profile selection, it seems like this downgrade protection
mechanism might trigger if you select the wrong profile for the
channel you started. That would lead to confusion.

Maybe we could detect if the user started with -P, and if so change
the error message to intelligently guide the user in that case?

-tom

------ Original Message ------
From: "Dave Townsend" <dtow...@mozilla.com>
To: "dev-platform" <dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org>; "Firefox Dev"
<firef...@mozilla.org>
Sent: 2018-10-18 3:32:36 PM
Subject: Coming in Firefox 65: Dedicated Profiles Per Install and
Profile Downgrade Protection

>In Firefox 65 we intend to ship two new features to help prevent user
>frustration caused by using profiles created by newer versions of
>Firefox.

This has been a serious problem from a community participation
perspective for a while now. Making it safe and easy to flip back and
forth between versions of Firefox will make casual participation in
testing and QA, among many other things, hugely easier and more
accessible; I'm quite grateful that we're doing this work.


- mhoye

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 6:31 AM Tom Ritter <t...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Awesome!
>
> > On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 3:32 PM Dave Townsend <dtow...@mozilla.com>
> wrote:
> > > For cases where users manually downgrade an install of Firefox or
> attempt
> > > to forcefully use an older version of Firefox with a newer profile the
> > > profile downgrade protection feature will now tell the user that the
> > > profile is too new to use with this Firefox giving them the option to
> > > create a new profile to use or to quit.
>
>
> If you have multiple channels installed, and have them all start with
> -P for profile selection, it seems like this downgrade protection
> mechanism might trigger if you select the wrong profile for the
> channel you started. That would lead to confusion.
>

Well one benefit of these changes is that you wouldn't need to run with -P
any longer, each installed channel will be able to have its own default
profile. And throwing a warning when you try to open your nightly profile
with beta is definitely intended.

> Maybe we could detect if the user started with -P, and if so change
> the error message to intelligently guide the user in that case?
>

Guide them in what way?

When creating a new profile to accomodate the downgrade, is the previous
data deleted? Are there options to keep the old profile for just in case or
selecting to use a new profile cleans the old one completely?

The new profile will be clean and empty. Since we know the previous profile
is from a newer version of Firefox there isn't a way to copy its data
without running the same risks as current downgrades. Users can use Firefox
Sync if they want to share data between profiles. The old profile is not
deleted though.

>
> The old profile is not deleted though.
>

Ok, thanks.That's what I wanted to confirm.

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 3:43 PM Dave Townsend <dtow...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 6:31 AM Tom Ritter <t...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> > On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 3:32 PM Dave Townsend <dtow...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> > > For cases where users manually downgrade an install of Firefox or attempt
>> > > to forcefully use an older version of Firefox with a newer profile the
>> > > profile downgrade protection feature will now tell the user that the
>> > > profile is too new to use with this Firefox giving them the option to
>> > > create a new profile to use or to quit.
>>
>>
>> If you have multiple channels installed, and have them all start with
>> -P for profile selection, it seems like this downgrade protection
>> mechanism might trigger if you select the wrong profile for the
>> channel you started. That would lead to confusion.
>
>
> Well one benefit of these changes is that you wouldn't need to run with -P any longer, each installed channel will be able to have its own default profile. And throwing a warning when you try to open your nightly profile with beta is definitely intended.

Well, if all you're using -P for is to separate profiles-by-channels,
then yea you can get rid of it, but one might have multiple
profiles/per channel.

(And yea, the warning in that case is definitely intended.)

>> Maybe we could detect if the user started with -P, and if so change
>> the error message to intelligently guide the user in that case?
>
> Guide them in what way?

Instead of saying "The profile is too new to use with this Firefox.
Create a new profile or Quit" maybe something like "The profile is too
new to use with this Firefox. Restart and choose a different profile
or Create a new profile"

-tom

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:32:36PM -0700, Dave Townsend wrote:
> In Firefox 65 we intend to ship two new features to help prevent user
> frustration caused by using profiles created by newer versions of Firefox.
>

> Why
>
> Firefox stores all of its settings in the user’s profile and unless certain
> command line arguments are used Firefox always launches with the same
> profile. Periodically as Firefox upgrades it makes changes to the settings
> that can render the profile unusable by earlier versions of Firefox. This
> can cause anything from certain features of Firefox being broken after a
> downgrade to Firefox crashing on startup.
>
> To protect against this two new features will be landing in Nightly soon.
>
> Dedicated Profiles Per Install
>
> A common cause of users switching between different versions of Firefox is
> having Firefox installed multiple times. This most often happens when users
> have different channels installed at the same time like ESR and Release. It
> is a common request to be able to run the different installs at the same
> time. In Firefox 35 this was made possible for the developer edition by
> giving it a dedicated profile. The new dedicated profiles per install
> feature extends this and will give every install of Firefox on the computer
> a dedicated profile by default.
>
> Users will be able to run different installs of Firefox simultaneously.
> Each will use a different profile for its settings. Upgrading an install of
> Firefox will keep it using the same settings.
>
> We’re tracking work on this feature in bug 1474285.
>
> Profile Downgrade Protection
>

> For cases where users manually downgrade an install of Firefox or attempt
> to forcefully use an older version of Firefox with a newer profile the
> profile downgrade protection feature will now tell the user that the
> profile is too new to use with this Firefox giving them the option to
> create a new profile to use or to quit.
>

> We’re tracking work on this feature in bug 1455707.
>
> Developer Implications
>
> As developers it is quite common to switch between different builds for
> example when testing different built versions of Firefox and doing
> regression testing. To support these use-cases a new command line argument
> “--allow-downgrade” will allow skipping the downgrade protection.
>
> Conclusions
>
> While some users may be impacted by this change we believe that most users
> will be unaffected and those that are will see less problems caused by
> downgrades than previously. This will give us the ability to ignore the
> possibility of downgrades when implementing new features and fixing bugs
> going forwards. Being able to make the assumption that this code works as
> designed will allow us flexibility in other changes downstream.

Does this also mean we can actively remove old data from profiles after
this work lands? My profile is very old, and there is a non-negligible
amount of data that has accumulated that's just leftover from old data
formats that have changed and are now stored in different files. We've
never cleaned those up presumably to support downgrades. It seems to me
with downgrades officially being unsupported, we should have an active
policy of removing old profile data when we migrate to new formats.

Mike

I certainly think so. What's more we can be more proactive about not
leaving that stuff around going forwards.

Can firefox be setup to make profile backups before each update? I
certainly wouldn't like having a surprise update to the degree of firefox
57 (which thankfully I was ready for) and then lose everything I had setup
just because firefox updated.

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 11:21 PM Dave Townsend <dtow...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

Is there a way migrate data from one profile to another? We occasionally
run user tests and ask people to install beta or nightly so that they can
test a feature with their current data (bookmarks, history, preferences,
etc). Will Firefox show up in the import wizard?
Thanks,
Michael
--
Michael Verdi • Firefox Search UX • Slack: verdi

Michael,

Should be able to just enable sync in each copy of Firefox and sync the items you need across profiles that way. Is that good enough?


--
Eric Shepherd
Senior Technical Writer
MDN Web Docs
https://developer.mozilla.org/

Can sharing with firefox sync be done just one way?

No… although you could turn sync off again after the initial sync is complete, I guess.

--
Eric Shepherd
Senior Technical Writer
MDN Web Docs
https://developer.mozilla.org/

No - sync is too complicated for a 15 minute test.

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 9:21 AM Eric Shepherd (Sheppy) <

Not currently no.

Dave could there be a way/option to migrate safe data to the new profile
similar to what we do with a refresh?

> _______________________________________________
> firefox-dev mailing list
> firef...@mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev
>

Our current Firefox migrator (used for a Firefox Refresh) just copies files
so wouldn't be suitable for a downgrade scenario as it could introduce
problems that we're trying to avoid with this approach. We could rewrite it
to be more like other migrators where it would read individual records from
the old profile and then insert them into the new file/DB but that would be
a fair amount of work.

For the case of testing a newer version like you mentioned (going from
Release to Beta or Nightly), copying the files should be safe and so you
could use the `-migration` command line option to migrate from the old
profile to the new one. There is no UI for this so you'd want to provide a
.bat file for the user to run your testing Firefox build with the command
line argument. We've done similar things for user testing
<https://github.com/bgrins/firefox-user-testing-helpers> before.

Cheers,
Matthew

Just a heads up, we've decided to defer this change to a later release to
make sure we get the experience right for our users. I'll post another
update once we have a better idea of when this will land.

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 12:32 PM Dave Townsend <dtow...@mozilla.com>

As promised here is that update. We have cleaned up the experience so that
it only impacts nightly until it rides the trains and added a snazzy new
first-run UI that explains what is going on. The plan is to land this at
the start of the 67 nightly cycle.

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 10:32 AM Dave Townsend <dtow...@mozilla.com>
wrote: