Why is there no UI for moving cache/profile locations?
Ok so it took me a long while to find how to move the cache location, and the reason is it's done by an entry that doesn't even exist originally, so a user would have to magically know the config string to even set it. (it's browser.cache.disk.parent_directory for those in the same waters as me) and it still did not move the profile location... To switch profile locations? The only doc that talks about it is here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder and it's not working so well for me (i.e. at all) but why do I have to copy and edit things? This is created automatically at first start so can't FF use the same method to create a new profile in an empty space?
And my actual question: is there any valid reason that there is no UI item to set the location of cache/profile directories??
Chosen solution
There has never been a UI for those settings - Mozilla is "stingy" about adding prefs that will only be needed once per installation to the UI. Also, I suppose the developers are confident that a power user who even thinks about moving the cache will search for instructions about how to do it. (BTW, when you move the Profile the cache is moved into the Profile folder, from it's original "local settings" folder path - so it is automatically moved out of APP DATA. You can still use that pref to place the cache exactly where you want it. I use a tiny partition for TEMP files and the Firefox cache, so they don't frag one of my larger logical drives.)
As far as the difficulties with moving a Profile, the developers have been threatening to remove Profiles from Firefox altogether for the last 3 or4 years and have WONTFIX'd any Bug filed about improving or adding new features to the Profile Manager. That will probably happen this year some time.
Between you and me, there is a new Profile Manager application that just went Beta that will probably be "released" just before the existing Profile Manager is pulled from Firefox. It is very schweet, and is still at the point where the developers are responding to Bug reports about features to be included and adding those features that are deemed important. I filed a minor Bug about the allowable characters in a Profile name, which was fixed within 3 or 4 weeks.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Profile_Manager
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools/Projects/ProfileManager
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/utilities/profilemanager/1.0_beta1/
You need to have Windows Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable installed for the Profile Manager XUL Runner application to work at this time. Hopefully that will change very soon, and all necessary files will be included in the Zip package.
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Chosen Solution
There has never been a UI for those settings - Mozilla is "stingy" about adding prefs that will only be needed once per installation to the UI. Also, I suppose the developers are confident that a power user who even thinks about moving the cache will search for instructions about how to do it. (BTW, when you move the Profile the cache is moved into the Profile folder, from it's original "local settings" folder path - so it is automatically moved out of APP DATA. You can still use that pref to place the cache exactly where you want it. I use a tiny partition for TEMP files and the Firefox cache, so they don't frag one of my larger logical drives.)
As far as the difficulties with moving a Profile, the developers have been threatening to remove Profiles from Firefox altogether for the last 3 or4 years and have WONTFIX'd any Bug filed about improving or adding new features to the Profile Manager. That will probably happen this year some time.
Between you and me, there is a new Profile Manager application that just went Beta that will probably be "released" just before the existing Profile Manager is pulled from Firefox. It is very schweet, and is still at the point where the developers are responding to Bug reports about features to be included and adding those features that are deemed important. I filed a minor Bug about the allowable characters in a Profile name, which was fixed within 3 or 4 weeks.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Profile_Manager
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools/Projects/ProfileManager
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/utilities/profilemanager/1.0_beta1/
You need to have Windows Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable installed for the Profile Manager XUL Runner application to work at this time. Hopefully that will change very soon, and all necessary files will be included in the Zip package.
Thanks, for the writeup that makes sense actually; I suppose there is more important things to do than putting in UIs for every little config option.
I guess it would make sense to in the case of temp files to have the setting string already be included and set to blank for default. This is pretty much standard practice with that sort of thing. Then one could simply type in cache in the about:config filter and quickly find the param that needs to be changed. This fix would also not really be involved (adding some logic to ignore if blank and adding the string by default)
As far as profiles go, I don't blame them, I don't think there is much use to them personally.
Thanks again!
the-edmeister and nerf5000,
do you have any clues for me about recovering emails from Thunderbird's cache?
the cache seems to be an sqlite file (about 2000 emails) and the inbox seems to be an msf file. trouble is I got a webmail upgrade today which wiped out all of my webmail files and as soon as I put the new passwords into Thunderbird, my Thunderbird inbox and sent mail showed empty, too.
as you might have guessed I have no idea what I'm doing! but I have found (and copied to the desktop) the sqlite file....any idea how to move or convert it so that all of the messages with magically reappear in Thunderbird's in/outbox?
Any advice is greatly APPRECIATED!