Investigate re-using the same Firefox profile between launches

[tomreece]

• Follow up with Jared after completing this
• Follow up with Kroot after completing this

Great suggestions from Jared:

Is it possible to use the same Firefox profile on each launch? Right now it’s generating a random profile in /tmp which means I can’t use uBlock to cut down on the Facebook/social garbage. I’ve been using /etc/hosts, but it would probably be faster for the script to load the same profile at each time. Also this would make Firefox not load the “First Run” page each time, it could load just about:blank or even pucatrade.com, saving some time. Also I think we aren’t getting any cache hits in Firefox because we’re generating a new cache with each crash. This is probably a huge performance bump not having to download set images and the like each time the script fires.

If the above isn’t possible/desired, or in addition to the above, is it possible to clean up the leftover profiles in /tmp when we crash? I have about 20 on my Raspberry Pi which isn’t fatal but means that over a long enough run period, I could run out of disk space. It’s like 101,000 files in the 20 profiles that I have. On a normal system, this isn’t the end of the world, but all of these on a small SDHC card runs its course.

[Wizard37]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22685755/retaining-cache-in-firefox-and-chrome-browser-selenium-webdriver

This may be easier than we think. I can just point it to an existing profile. I wanted to tinker with this myself but I'm not super-comfortable with it.