I see the use case for developers who want to test multiple versions.
But as stevekemp said, the average user is losing their profile when simply upgrading from one version to the next. And it seems that the fix to this is to go back into the Profile Manager and set you old profile as the new default. Wouldn't this inadvertently cause data loss for the average user? (Ex: My parents do not even know Profile Manager is, much less that Profiles exist)
If anything, I see this as a bad thing - especially for those who do not use FF Sync. Am I interpreting this correctly? We're talking about regular FF here, not Developer Edition, correct?
Edit:
> People who want to keep their work and personal browsing separate.
I thought that's what Multi-Account Containers was supposed to help with.
Not quite. In the normal case, users will never see any difference as a result of this change. Most users will experience it, semantically, as "profile per channel," separating normal Firefox from Firefox Nightly, etc. And if you only use stable Firefox, you only have one profile.
That means that upgrading from Firefox n to Firefox n+1 is totally fine and it will continue to use the same profile. But installing Beta or Nightly will now default to using a separate profile, instead of trying to use the same local data as normal Firefox.
I suspect Steve's issue is because he's unpacking his new version of Firefox to a different location on disk, so we're treating it like a separate install, rather than an upgrade of an already installed Firefox.
But as stevekemp said, the average user is losing their profile when simply upgrading from one version to the next. And it seems that the fix to this is to go back into the Profile Manager and set you old profile as the new default. Wouldn't this inadvertently cause data loss for the average user? (Ex: My parents do not even know Profile Manager is, much less that Profiles exist)
If anything, I see this as a bad thing - especially for those who do not use FF Sync. Am I interpreting this correctly? We're talking about regular FF here, not Developer Edition, correct?
Edit:
> People who want to keep their work and personal browsing separate.
I thought that's what Multi-Account Containers was supposed to help with.