Profile Creation - The technical part
What is a profile?
All of the changes a user makes in Firefox, like the home page, what toolbars you use, installed addons, saved passwords and your bookmarks, are all stored in a special folder, called a profile. Telemetry stores archived and pending pings in the profile directory as well as metadata like the client ID.
Every run of Firefox needs a profile. However a single installation can use multiple profiles for different runs. The profile folder is stored in a separate place from the Firefox program so that, if something ever goes wrong with Firefox, the profile information will still be there.
Firefox also comes with a Profile Manager, a different run mode to create, migrate and delete the profiles.
Profile Behaviors
In order to understand the behavior of users and base analysis on things like the profile creation date, it is essential to understand how a profile is created and identified by the browser. Also, it is important to understand how user actions with and within profiles affect our ability to reason about profiles from a data perspective. This includes resetting or deleting profiles or opting into or out of sending Telemetry data.
The different cases are described in more detail in the following sections.
Profile Creation
There are multiple ways a Firefox profile can be created. Some of these behave slightly differently.
Profiles can be created and managed by the Firefox Profile Manager:
- New profile on first launch
- New profile from Profile Manager
--createprofilecommand line argument
Profiles can be created externally and not be managed by the Firefox Profile Manager:
--profilecommand line argument
Managed: First use
When Firefox is opened for the first time after a fresh install, without any prior Firefox profile on disk visible to Firefox, it will create a new profile. Firefox uses "Default User" as the profile name, creates the profile's directory with a random suffix and marks the new profile as default for subsequent starts of Firefox. Read where Firefox stores your profile data.
Managed: Profile Manager creation
The user can create a new profile through the Profile Manager.
This can either be done on about:profiles in a running Firefox or by starting Firefox with the --ProfileManager flag.
The Profile Manager will ask for a name for the profile and picks a new directory for it.
The Profile Manager allows the user to create a new profile from an existing directory (in which case any files will be included) or from scratch (in which case the directory will be created).
The --createprofile flag can be used from the command line and works the same as creating a profile through the Profile Manager.
Unmanaged: Command-line start
Firefox can be started on the command line with a path to a profile directory: firefox --profile path/to/directory.
If the directory does not exist it will be created.
A profile created like this will not be picked up by the Profile Manager.
Its data will persist after Firefox is closed, but the Profile Manager will not know about it.
The profile will not turn up in about:profiles.
Profile Reset
A user can reset the profile (see Refresh Firefox - reset addons and settings). This will copy over most user data to a new directory, keeping things like the history, bookmarks and cookies, but will remove extensions, modified preferences and added search engines.
A profile reset will not change the Telemetry clientID.
The date of the most recent profile reset is saved and will be contained in Telemetry pings in the profile.resetDate field.
Profile Deletion
A profile can be deleted through the Profile Manager, which will delete all stored data from disk. The profile can also be deleted by simply removing the profile's directory. We will never know about a deletion. We simply won't see that profile in new Telemetry data anymore.
Uninstalling the Firefox installation will not remove any profile data.
Note: Removing a profile's directory while it is in use is not recommended and will lead to a corrupt state.
Telemetry opt-out
The user can opt out of sending Telemetry data.
When the user opts out, Telemetry sends one "optout" ping, containing an empty payload.
The local clientID is reset to a fixed value.
When a user opts into sending Telemetry data, a new clientID is generated and used in subsequent pings.
The profile itself and the profile creation date are unaffected by this.
Profile Creation Date
The profile creation date is the assumed date of initial profile creation. However it proved to be not reliable for all cases. There are multiple ways this date is determined.
Managed: During Profile Creation
When a profile is created explicitly the profile directory is created and a times.json containing a timestamp of the current time is stored inside that profile directory1.
It is read at later times when the profile creation date is used.
Relevant parts in the code: nsAppRunner::SelectProfile calling nsToolkitProfileService::CreateProfile.
Unmanaged: Empty profile directory
When --profile path/to/directory is passed on the command line, the directory is created if it does not exist, but no times.json is written2.
On the first access of the profile creation date (through ProfileAge.jsm) the module will detect that the times.json is missing.
It will then iterate through all files in the current profile's directory, reading file creation or modification timestamps.
The oldest of these timestamps is then assumed to be the profile creation date and written to times.json.
Subsequent runs of Firefox will then use this date.
Relevant part in the code: nsAppRunner::SelectProfile creating the directory.