Mozilla Firefox

Bug #31746
Comment #45

Comment 45 for bug 31746

Revision history for this message

Marius Gedminas (mgedmin) wrote on 2009-02-25: Re: Impossible to use multiple profiles at the same time

#45

I guess the main issue here is this: it's unclear how someone could use multiple Firefox profiles.

'man firefox' says there's no man page. 'firefox -h' lists '-P profilename' and -'ProfileManager' options, but if you try to use them when you already have a Firefox window open (and who doesn't have one open all the time?), they will be silently ignored, leading users to assume they're broken. The '-a' option is not documented by 'firefox -h'. Only obscure googling/reading the wrapper shell script sources tells you that you should run 'firefox -a profilename -P profilename' to get a new window using a separate profile. The other workaround -- using '-no-remote' instead of '-a something' -- also suffers from the same lack of documentation.

Even when you discover that, it doesn't always do what you want if you want to open new windows in the firefox instance that uses a different profile from your main one, e.g. try:

1. firefox -a selenium -P selenium &
2. firefox -a selenium http://www.google.com

Step (2) will give you an error message "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system." This directly contradicts the bit of documentation that Michael quoted and makes certain borderline use cases hard or impossible (an automated test runner that wants to spawn new firefox windows and interact with them -- I'd rather it did that in a separate profile with all the correct language settings and js options to disable all the interactive popup confirmations).

I would suggest closing this long and meandering bug and instead opening a few new ones:

  1. please document the '-a' and '-no-remote' options in firefox --help
  2. please document that '-P' and '-ProfileManager' are ignored when firefox with the given application ID is already running
  3. please make 'firefox -a someappid url' successfully communicate with an already running firefox instance instead of showing an error

and perhaps, for better user friendliness

4. please make 'firefox -ProfileManager' always open the profile manager (i.e. treat it as if -no-remote was implicitly requested)
5. please make 'firefox -P profilename' open a browser window using that profile (e.g. treat it as if -a profilename was also specified)

Sounds good?

I guess the main issue here is this: it's unclear how someone could use multiple Firefox profiles.

'man firefox' says there's no man page.  'firefox -h' lists '-P profilename' and -'ProfileManager' options, but if you try to use them when you already have a Firefox window open (and who doesn't have one open all the time?), they will be silently ignored, leading users to assume they're broken.  The '-a' option is not documented by 'firefox -h'.  Only obscure googling/reading the wrapper shell script sources tells you that you should run 'firefox -a profilename -P profilename' to get a new window using a separate profile.  The other workaround -- using '-no-remote' instead of '-a something' -- also suffers from the same lack of documentation.

Even when you discover that, it doesn't always do what you want if you want to open new windows in the firefox instance that uses a different profile from your main one, e.g. try:

1. firefox -a selenium -P selenium &
  2. firefox -a selenium http://www.google.com

Step (2) will give you an error message "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system."  This directly contradicts the bit of documentation that Michael quoted and makes certain borderline use cases hard or impossible (an automated test runner that wants to spawn new firefox windows and interact with them -- I'd rather it did that in a separate profile with all the correct language settings and js options to disable all the interactive popup confirmations).

I would suggest closing this long and meandering bug and instead opening a few new ones:

and perhaps, for better user friendliness

4. please make 'firefox -ProfileManager' always open the profile manager (i.e. treat it as if -no-remote was implicitly requested)
  5. please make 'firefox -P profilename' open a browser window using that profile (e.g. treat it as if -a profilename was also specified)

Sounds good?