[linux-elitists] Firefox Profiles are a Good Idea

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all.

This post to this list by Karsten M. Self caught my memory:

http://allium.zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2004-November/010576.html

In it, he ranted against several Mozilla and Firefox concepts that he 
considered bad. One of them was the Firefox profiles. However, as it turned 
out to me, I found them to be very useful.

First of all let me know, that my family have been using two Firefox profiles 
on a single Windows' machine account, so that only one will log in to the 
university's network, for some time now. A similar setup could prove useful 
for someone who only has an under-privileged account on a UNIX machine.

Furthermore, each profile has its own list of installed and enabled plugins. 
So if some plugins misbehave under certain conditions, one can use a profile 
that doesn't have them installed. Recently, I tried to post to LiveJournal 
using my default and overloaded Firefox profile, and it got stuck after 
previewing the post. So today I set up another profile which I called "Bare 
Essentials" with no plugins defined, and used it to post to LiveJournal. It 
worked beautifully on both times without a hick-up.

Karsten's comment about the fact that a user is prompted to create a profile, 
has since been resolved. Now Firefox automatically creates a default profile, 
and most users will never see the profiles' choice dialog. One can configure 
Firefox to show it at startup in order to choose a profile, but it's 
otherwise kept out of the concern of most mundane users.

So I think the Firefox profiles, as currently implemented are a good idea, and 
a useful feature of the browser.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif@iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

I'm not an actor - I just play one on T.V.