Of course I understand that those bug quotes are from a slightly different bug – but my point was, that’s a dangerous sentiment to have. Oh, I understand the reasons (in the context of that bug), but the way I found that quote was through a discussion group on User Profiles being removed from the main UI. So there are people who see it this way.

And just to be clear – I’m a software developer, too. I understand the issues faced by this project better than the average user.

So, maybe this is more about a perception problem than an actual technical one. I hate to sound cheesy, but perhaps some “PR” is in order here, to explain things? Reading bug reports to find out why things were done can be quite difficult, sometimes even for me. (Sometimes parts of the conversation take place via email instead of bug comments, which is really hard to decipher.)

I’m glad to hear you’re willing and capable of listening. It’s very reassuring to hear you say so. As a user, it’s part of my job to occasionally doubt the motives of the project team, lest we become complacent. A little shake-up now and then results in more confidence after its been resolved.

And yes, I am more than willing and capable of participating – I do my best to dutifully file the best bug reports I can when I (rarely) find bugs. I fire up virtual machines to test new builds in new configurations. And I promote Firefox quite strongly (try visiting my site with IE and see what I mean).

And if I have come across as a little too strong, smug, or insulting – I apologize. But you must admit, the end result – your reply – is exactly the kind of reassurance I was after. So in the end, my post achieved the results I was after.

The Firefox developers are indeed very capable of listening, and have proven that they do so frequently and often. We empower “lowly users” (though none of us think of them that way) more than any organization I know, and give them the opportunity to voice their concerns and advocate strongly for their views.

Listening is not the same thing as obeying, though, which is where I think your argument goes astray. Yes, we’re listening, and we definitely know that there are a vocal set of users who rely on profile management for a set of their daily tasks. You may indeed be surprised to know that a *vast* majority of Firefox developers are in this subset as well, since we’re pretty constantly flipping between profiles for testing one version of the browser or another. What we have discovered, however, is that supporting multiple profiles can lead to some truly thrilling edge-condition bugs. The comment you decided to quote was from a bug to do with what happens if, say, a user creates a new profile and specifies that it is to be contained in c:\someimportantdir. Deleting that profile would delete all the contents of that directory! Now, we could spend a lot of time and effort trying to protect from that case (and indeed, we’d never get it fully right, as add-ons can lay down files in profiles with no way for Firefox to tell) but the decision was made that since profile manager isn’t meant to be used by average users, we weren’t going to worry about this (admittedly dangerous) use case where someone can shoot themselves in the foot.

Further, closing the door on that particular bug was a response to people behaving poorly and using improper Bugzilla ettiquette. This is another aspect about listening well: there is a cost to listening, and just because someone takes the time to write does not mean that they are owed a response.

Finally, we constantly revisit design decisions in the light of new information and changing contexts. Two years ago, with Vista and OSX taking over with Fast User Switching capabilities, there was a real expectation of one-profile-per-user. It’s not at all clear that was realized, and it would be wonderful if someone had better data than “everyone I know” to help us understand the current context. Supporting multiple profiles is not cost free. A good start would be to collect the passionate community around that need and generate a proposal for UI, or get the web to help create an Add-On to show us the experiences you’re trying to create. Yes, even you, a lowly user, can participate by being part of the solution, not just the identification of what you consider to be a problem. Work with us to convince us all that this is worth the effort and investment. I certainly think (especially with the deep personalization that we’re moving towards with things like the Awesomebar) that there are arguments to be made here.

I find it interesting that many people believe that because we are a community driven, open source project that means that we will gleefully fix all bugs reported. Often times, one man’s bug is another man’s feature, and to design well we must choose what we believe are the right experiences to focus on. Problem identification is easy; collaborating with the community to find solutions – that’s the hard part.

So yes, we’re willing and capable of listening. Are you willing and capable of participating?