OK, this is easily the best browser I ever used. I *love* it!

But why oh why do they have to make it so hard to move settings around? I mean, if you’re into the Mozilla suite, you’re the type of guy that uses Mozilla today, Firefox and Thunderbird tomorrow, and then goes back to Mozilla the day after that.

Right now, this not only means copying stuff around in your prefs directory, nooooo – you also need to edit prefs.js manually, create empty profiles, edit the absolute path in preferences, copy cookies and password settings, re-install themes and extensions (what the hell was the URL for that nifty one again? Why are my icons in thunderbird different after that install?).

Not nice. Not at all. Not as it should be.

Here’s what I think they should do to end this once and for all: create a top level directory “Mozilla” in the prefs directory and have sub directories that belong to the components, i.e. “profiles”, “browser”, “email”, “suite” etc.. Use neutral names that can stay even after you’ve gone through “Phoenix”, “Firebird” and “Firefox” (no one cares if these names fit the application’s names).

The only absolute path will be the one leading to the top level directory, and that one can usually be guessed for each OS (i.e. “Mozilla” in the directory where prefs are being stored). Anything else uses relative addressing to that directory. The suite and the components should share the same directories – I mean, come on, I can understand why other apps are not that clever, but cleverness is supposed to be an advantage for Open Source, right?

If done like that, noone would ever need to copy stuff around, you might even be able to use a server based directory from multiple machines.

Any reasons why this shouldn’t be possible? Find ‘em and kill ‘em ;)

No related posts.