Comment 113 for bug 93546

I don't think it's that easy, but if it is you could write a prototype patch and some tests, and prove me wrong. I like being wrong about stuff like this!

There are a lot of broken NFS impls out there still. And AFS. History and bookmarks are in a unified store (key to a bunch of great features in FF3), so splitting them is non-trivial. Users can run multiple copies on different profiles, and a simple cp -r of the profile should suffice if you want to go there.

If nothing else, without a good set of tests for such sharing, I'd be reluctant to take such changes into the tree -- it's an uncommon scenario that wouldn't get good ambient test coverage, and breaking it would result in user dataloss rather than user inconvenience.

If such things are important to a decent number of people, especially those who are on Unix environments and therefore more technically adept than average, I would expect that someone with such environments to hand could write some good automated tests, and then on that basis a patch to decouple or lock or whatever.

(Tweaking a lock file around every write sounds like a performance disaster to me, but without a patch to test we're just throwing guesses around. Yours are based on your knowledge of your own environment. Mine are based on total ignorance of that environment, but a decade of experience with this profile code and our file layer. Only code can break the tie. :) )