Firefox should not permanently delete profiles
TL;DR: I am dumb, but not an idiosyncratic web browser user, and it was too easy for me to accidentally permanently delete all of my browser data. Deleted profiles should be moved into system trash when deleted, not rm'd entirely.
I have never used "profiles" and somehow, after updating firefox, seemed to have created one. I have no interest in using the feature, and therefore went to delete the new profile and disable the feature. Somehow, I instead deleted the profile I had implicitly been using all along. I clicked too hastily through the warning about deleting files, because it simply did not occur to me that deleting something related to this net-new feature should clear all of my *old* data. My goal was to restore the experience I've had in firefox for years (without profiles), but because I failed to adapt to the new feature, I lost everything instead.
I apologize for maybe shouting into the void about this, but I am posting on the off chance that this will reach someone who's involved in the implementation of these features and can save some other dumb person like me from making the same dumb mistake. It's quite painful to suddenly lose years of accumulated bookmarks, extensions, history, etc. The easiest and least intrusive solution would be to always move profiles into system trash when they are deleted, and never permanently delete them.
All Replies (3)
I have never used "profiles" and somehow, after updating firefox, seemed to have created one.
There is always a profile. The first time you install one is created, but it is not default to create one when upgrading unless maybe the old one is really old. From what did you upgrade.
One the security of the profile a) you can always manually make a back up or use the inbuilt option to avoid such.
As for the using the trash can, yes this seems like an option, but that option is for manual deletion so wouldn't go well with application deletions as they have a world of their own :(
amoun said
As for the using the trash can, yes this seems like an option, but that option is for manual deletion so wouldn't go well with application deletions as they have a world of their own :(
I think this could be done programmatically. Gtk: https://docs.gtk.org/gio/method.File.trash.html macOS: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/filemanager/trashitem(at:resultingitemurl:)
I'm not sure about windows, but I would assume there is a way?
Another decent option would be to move the profile to a system tmp directory and include a recovery option, so it is only permanently deleted on restart. That would have solved the problem in my case.
To answer your question, I'm not sure which version of firefox I came from, but it wasn't that old -- for instance, I already had split view, which I think is a new feature. I think maybe there was some change that caused me to be prompted to create a profile where I had never been prompted to do so before, but honestly I'm not sure.
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