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We have been developing a SaaS app for two years now and the most serious issue is that Firefox Nightly shares the profile with the stable build. Sounds harmles

by jansan 9y ago

We have been developing a SaaS app for two years now and the most serious issue is that Firefox Nightly shares the profile with the stable build. Sounds harmless, but it is not if you have installed Nightly and stable and the website uses indexeddb! The indexeddb, once modified in the Nightly, cannot be opened in stable build anymore. So you are trapped in Nightly forever if you access websites with indexeddb. The only way back is to completly erase your profile. That's why we actively warn users not to install Nightly on their system.

soapdog 9y ago
I know you didn't ask this and that this doesn't solve the problems for your own users but you can run nightly or any Firefox version with different profiles by passing a command line argument or by installing one of the many profile switching add-ons available. Personally, I have nightly with a nightly profile, Dev Edition has its own profile anyway, and stable with the default profile. They all sync with Firefox Sync. At least for your personal usage, this may serve you.
- jansan 9y ago
  Thanks for the information, this may help me a lot for testing against Nightly in future. But still I think having the standard installation of a Nightly mess with your stable build is just a no-go. Chrome's approach by simply maintaining a second profile for the canary build is how to do it.
  - soapdog 9y ago
    I agree with you. As always, we can open an issue about it. Will try and see how it goes...
dblohm7 9y ago
Perhaps you should use Developer Edition instead? It uses a separate profile.
- jansan 9y ago
  Wow, thanks. Comments like yours are why I keep coming back to Hacker News.
- nachtigall 9y ago
  You can also create new profiles by hand. See sibling answer.
nachtigall 9y ago
I totally feel your pain. You might want to share your use case at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1255740 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1255740 which is the bug for creating different profiles by default. There's many people having the same problem, so here's the solution for doing it manually: https://superuser.com/questions/679797/how-to-run-firefox-nightly-alongside-firefox-at-the-same-time/680160 https://superuser.com/questions/679797/how-to-run-firefox-ni...

by jansan 9y ago

soapdog 9y ago

I know you didn't ask this and that this doesn't solve the problems for your own users but you can run nightly or any Firefox version with different profiles by passing a command line argument or by installing one of the many profile switching add-ons available. Personally, I have nightly with a nightly profile, Dev Edition has its own profile anyway, and stable with the default profile. They all sync with Firefox Sync. At least for your personal usage, this may serve you.

jansan 9y ago
Thanks for the information, this may help me a lot for testing against Nightly in future. But still I think having the standard installation of a Nightly mess with your stable build is just a no-go. Chrome's approach by simply maintaining a second profile for the canary build is how to do it.
- soapdog 9y ago
  I agree with you. As always, we can open an issue about it. Will try and see how it goes...

dblohm7 9y ago

Perhaps you should use Developer Edition instead? It uses a separate profile.

jansan 9y ago
Wow, thanks. Comments like yours are why I keep coming back to Hacker News.
nachtigall 9y ago
You can also create new profiles by hand. See sibling answer.

nachtigall 9y ago

I totally feel your pain. You might want to share your use case at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1255740 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1255740 which is the bug for creating different profiles by default. There's many people having the same problem, so here's the solution for doing it manually: https://superuser.com/questions/679797/how-to-run-firefox-nightly-alongside-firefox-at-the-same-time/680160 https://superuser.com/questions/679797/how-to-run-firefox-ni...