One of the most frequently support questions is: "Mozilla isn't able to convert my old NS profile to mozilla. How do I do this?" There's only the non-intuitive way of starting "mozilla -profilemanager" (or something along the lines) or running the installer version. It would be great to offer the taskmanager from the "task" menu in mozilla. How difficult would this be?

I assume you meant profilemanager instead of taskmanager. I see one big problem with this. ProfileManager cannot be run while Mozilla is running. If you want to run the profileManager, you have to close Mozilla, then restart it with the -ProfileManager flag. So if we want to implement a "Run ProfileManager" menu item, it should close Mozilla, then reopen it. I'm not sure that's what we want. (But I agree we should have a more intuitive way of starting ProfileManager.) Fabian.

whoops, sure I meant ProfileManager where I said Taskmanager. I still think it would be more advantagous to pop up a dialog saying: "In order to manage your profiles, mozilla has to be shutdown and all open windows, and unsaved mails will be lost. Do you want to do this: <yes> <no> Right now there is no intuitive possibility to do this and people keep asking how to convert their NS profiles all the time.

*** Bug 66415 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

See also bug 35559, "Profile Manager needs to support dynamic switching".

add myself to the cc list

Profile Manager FE bugs --> me

changing QA contact

Matthew, can you provide UI info on how the profile selector should be accessed from inside the app? usability/polish, 0.9.4.

`Tools' > `Utilities' > `Profile Manager'

Mass moving lower-priority bugs to 0.9.6 (with Blake's pre-consent) to make room for remaining 0.9.4/eMojo bugs and MachV planning, performance and feature work. If anyone disagrees with the new target, please let me know.

I think it's a very annoying issue that the profile manager can't be started while the browser is running, especially now with the -turbo mode where the browser process keeps running. If you try to start the profile manager on Windows from the start menu, it just opens a new browser window. There is no error or indication of any problem or what the user needs to do, even if he figured out that he needs profile manager. This is a seriously defficient UI and should be higher than a P3. It shouldn't just be an enhancement request but a genuine bug.

reassigning to ben.

How about allowing Profile Manager to start up from the Tasks menu, without shutting other Mozilla windows, but graying out the active profile, so that it cannot be accessed?

We could just create a tools/utilities start menu item like Netscape 4.x did that had a shortcut for User Profile manager

Ben, I would hope the solution doesn't depend on the Windows start menu . There are other platforms out there that need the profile manager too. On OS/2 for example there is a "profile manager" desktop icon that simply calls mozilla.exe -profilemanager for the profilemanager. But if mozilla is already running, clicking the "profile manager" icon just causes a new blank browser window to be open. This is very confusing. I agree that allowing the profile manager to start but greying out the current profile would be ok. However, you might have other issues if the browser with that profile gets closed, and then gets restarted with a different profile, while profile manager is still running. Might have to do some IPC to keep things in sync.

*** Bug 154761 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

in the help file, the command line switch -profilemanager is explicitely mentioned for Linux, but it works in win98 too (and from the comments here i assume in other OS's).

See also bug 97622, Put in UI for dynamic profile switching. I think this should be marked as a dup of bug 97622.

It's not a dupe. This bug blocks that one. This is quite a dependency chain.

*** Bug 155608 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This doesn't block bug 97622 at all. Ben can call it a dup, or whatever.

Julien Pierre wrote in Comment #15: >I would hope the solution doesn't depend on the Windows start menu. >if mozilla is already running, clicking the "profile manager" >icon just causes a new blank browser window to be open. >This is very confusing. My simple proposal to notify user that ProfMan cannot load when Mozilla is running is to open an according help-page in the opened browser window (istead of empty page). This seems very easy to implement, is not a long-term solution, but helps newbies like I was 4 weeks ago. At least they would know what's the reason for that the ProfMan "is not working" and how to make it work (I was looking in the net for some time). Georg

It's now working in the most recent nightly build (1.3 series). Tools | Switch Profiles. The whole Profile Manager interface is there. This is a duplicate of bug 97622.

The only thing that might stop this being a dupe of bug 97622 is the wording, what if I do not want to switch profile but create a new one? However it is probably better to open a new bug if someone wants to change this. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 97622 ***

*** Bug 213566 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***