Support/Firefox Features/Clean up user profile

From MozillaWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Draft-template-image.png THIS PAGE IS A WORKING DRAFT Pencil-emoji U270F-gray.png
The page may be difficult to navigate, and some information on its subject might be incomplete and/or evolving rapidly.
If you have any questions or ideas, please add them as a new topic on the discussion page.
Feature Status ETA Owner
Add ability to clean up user profiles Finalizing proposal. YYYY-MM-DD Michael Verdi

Summary

We should provide some way for users to automatically fix Firefox (by fixing their profile) during the installation process. There are a number of serious Firefox issues (not starting, crashing, unexpected behavior, lost toolbars and more) that can be solved by fixing the user's profile. The problem is, fixing a profile is an incredibly difficult task – see these two articles (1, 2) for complete steps. Many users try to reinstall Firefox to solve these issues but reinstallation doesn't do anything to the profile folder. Providing this option on installation makes it both intuitive and discoverable.

Team

Who's working on this?

Team list should make it clear who to ask about what, and who to ping when they're needed. If you do not need someone in a particular role (ie: Security), that's fine, just delete that line. Contact info for each person would also be handy.

Release Requirements

Complete checklist of items that need to be satisfied before we can call this feature "done".

Next Steps

Either the next set of tasks that need to happen to move this project along, or (ideally) the full list of project tasks/action items with things crossed off as they're finished. Including the name of who's responsible for each item can be useful.

Open Issues

How could this work on OS X and Linux since they don't have the same install process as Windows?

Related Bugs & Dependencies

Links to the feature tracking bug & other relevant bugs; links to related plans (test plan, product marketing plan, etc.); notes about things that depend on this, etc.

Designs

Any and all mockups, design specs, tech specs, etc. Either inline or linked to.

Test Plans

Any and all test plans and strategies. Either inline or linked to.

Goals/Use Cases

The goal is to take a difficult and confusing repair process that most people never discover (and often need one on one help to complete when they do find it) and turn it into an easy and discoverable operation that can be done without guidance.

Non-Goals

A Clean Install is another installation-time repair process that is not covered by this feature.

Other Documentation

Legend (remove if you like)

  Healthy: feature is progressing as expected.
  Blocked: feature is currently blocked.
  At Risk: feature is at risk of missing its targeted release.
ETA Estimated date for completion of the current feature task. Overall ETA for the feature is the product release date.


Please remove this line and any non-relevant categories below. Add whatever other categories you feel are appropriate.