Frequently Asked Questions
The purpose of a FAQ is generally to provide information on frequent questions or concerns; however, the format is a useful means of organizing information, and text consisting of questions and their answers may thus be called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked.
General
Is Flechette publicly available?
No, it is currently in private beta. Get in touch if you want to get involved.
When will Flechette be publicly available?
When it is ready. Get in touch if you want to get involved in the current private beta.
Desktop
Why are Firefox profiles duplicated?
Firefox saves your personal information such as bookmarks, passwords and user preferences in a set of files called your profile, which is stored in a separate location from the Firefox program files. You can have multiple Firefox profiles, each containing a separate set of user information.
Flechette automatically detects Firefox profiles and provides separate targets for them. If you have a single installation of Firefox you should not see any duplication. If you have several installations of Firefox (e.g. ESR, Beta, Nightly etc…), you may see that all profiles from all installations are available with each installation in Flechette.
On some operating systems the Firefox profiles for different installations are stored in a single place. Starting with Firefox 67, profiles are associated with installations with a new mechanism.
If you are curious to learn more about this, have a read at these links:
- Dedicated profiles per Firefox installation
- Understanding in depth the profile per installation feature
In short, the way profiles are associated with installation is opaque and can’t reasonably be understood by Flechette. This manifests by Flechette associating every available profile to each installation.
As a workaround, we suggest that you manually disable the non-sensical profiles targets in Flechette.
In more details, Flechette locates and reads Firefox’s profiles.ini file that contains information about the available profiles.
Association with different installations is stored in a new installs.ini file plus some new information added in profiles.ini.
The way the association between profiles and installation is done is based on some hashing of the installation path.
So far so good, in theory.
This hashing is supposedly using the CityHash algorithm, introduced by Google in 2011. But, the CityHash algorithm is not standardised/finalized at all, it’s some Google internal optimization. Firefox uses its own derived implementation that gives different results compared to the Google one, and all others available out there. It turns out that when implementing dedicated profiles per installation, the Firefox team reused a hash for the installation paths that was already around. This hash was originally supposed to be an internal implementation detail of Firefox. The feature authors acknowledge that using this internal hash in a user facing feature may have been a mistake.
As a consequence of the above, and given the workaround is pretty reasonable, we decided not to implement support for dedicated profiles per installation.
Note that on Linux using Snap or Flatpak packages, this issue doesn’t happen because each installation has its own isolated user configuration storage.