Fabian Guisset wrote to .prefs:
> As a Bugzilla QA I know the problems that profiles cause to our users.
> [...] This is also true for Netscape 6 users, who are worried that
> they eventually could not upgrade to the next Netscape release.
As a Mozilla distributor, I can second that.
Thanks Fabian for bringing this problem up. I'd have done this sometime
otherwise.
> 1) There is an evident compatibility issue between
> Netscape6/Mozilla0.6 and the later versions of mozilla, like 0.7. We
> have recieved a lot of bugs that said "Mozilla hangs at splash
> screen", and creating a new profile fixed it. [...] Is this a known
> issue, and can I give reporters a valid reason why they should delete
> their current profile?
As a similar problem, I have seen lots of reports that Beonex
Navigator's urlbar is not visible (without any chance to unhide it). It
seems like Netscape 6 somehow messes up the profile. Creating a new
profile seemed to fix the problem.
Note that Beonex Communicator 0.6 bases on the same source code as
Netscape 6.0, apart from Netscape-proprietary features. Beonex made no
changes in this area.
> 2) Can we expect profile formats (assuming the compatibility issues
> are due to a change in the formats) to be stable at some point in the
> development? If yes, when? 3) What are the possible ways of corrupting
> a profile (i.e. the files that are the most subject to corruption).
> If any, is there a way to clean them up?
One way I found is bug 57246. There are a lot more. :-(
> I think this sums up pretty much all my questions about problems with
> profiles. They are very generic questions, I know that, and it might
> be very difficult to answer
And similarly difficult to fix. But this sort of problems is basically
dataloss (telling end-users to delete their profiles is not cool at
all), and is extremely important to be fixed. Profiles must not corrupt
and must work with / be migrated to newer versions, at least for releases.
I am scared about new versions for Beonex Communicator...
> but even if you have only parts of answers, please post them, it
> could enhance the QA's and our users' experience of Mozilla a lot.
