[Mozilla Enterprise] Downgrade Protection and Profile Per Installation in Firefox 68

[Copus, Scott]

Is there already a very detailed technical article or dev blog documenting these proposed Firefox downgrade-protection & profile-per-installation changes?  It sounds like the details of these changes are needed for some admins to ascertain if this will impact their environment or not.

Can we get a basic rundown of how profile migrations have historically functioned before?  That should help paint a better picture at least for me.  Is this how it works now? … After an admin upgrades Firefox, do all the users’ profiles on that system get “upgraded” to that profile version upon those users launching Firefox the first time?  I assume that Firefox also has to maintain multiple profile version migration paths in its installers?  If not how is upgrading profiles to version X from X-1, X-2, X-3, X-10 all work?  If this is already documented somewhere, please point me there.

Would anyone be able to provide sample scenarios that someone would be able to walk us through that would tell us what’s changing “under the hood” and what settings (environment variables, group policies, prefs, etc) are available to change its behavior?  For example, after Firefox gets upgraded from X to Y (leaving only a single installation afterwards), do any user profiles get modified then—or only at user launch (and what happening logically under the hood)?  Other scenarios would be downgrade, side-by-side installs of multiple versions and channels.

If an admin decides to activate the environment variables disabling these features “later on down the road”, and a user already has multiple profiles, what’s Firefox behavior in this regard—how does it know which profile it should use upon next startup?

Are there going to be any separate profile tools or switches to help with profile “cleanup” or any helpful functions related to these changes?

--
Scott Copus, Desktop Support Systems Engineer
Information Technology Services | Western Kentucky University
https://www.wku.edu/its

From: Enterprise [mailto:enterprise-bounces at mozilla.org] On Behalf Of Mike Kaply
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2019 11:06 AM
To: Klaus Hartnegg <hartnegg at gmx.de>
Cc: Mozilla.org <enterprise at mozilla.org>
Subject: Re: [Mozilla Enterprise] Downgrade Protection and Profile Per Installation in Firefox 68

** This message originated from outside WKU. Always use caution following links. **
Firefox will only create a new profile if it determines that the install directory has changed from the previous Firefox that used this profile. So if you have Firefox installed in two different directories, they will use two different profiles.

New versions of Firefox will not create new profiles since they use the same install directory.

Mike

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 5:32 AM Klaus Hartnegg <hartnegg at gmx.de<mailto:hartnegg at gmx.de>> wrote:
What do you mean with new profile per install?
Will the version number become part of the name of the profile directory?
Or will it do the same guid-madness that already causes Windows to forget Firefox as default-browser with each update?

Will Firefox compare on each start its version with the one in the profile directory, and if its own version is higher then trigger a migration to a new profile directory? Using the newest of the existing ones as source?

Does this only affect the directory in appdata, or also in localappdata?

What will happen with all the old directories? They already consume a lot of disk space.


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