Indistinguishable from Jesse

From bug 330884:

This privacy flaw has caused my fiancé and I to break-up after having dated for 5 years.

The reporter's fiancé had secretly used Firefox on her computer to visit dating sites such as JDate, SwingLifeStyle, and Adult FriendFinder. While logging into those sites, he told Firefox to never remember passwords for those sites. He then uninstalled Firefox, probably because he was worried that she would find out which sites he had been visiting.

Later, she installed Firefox for herself, and happened to need to edit the list of sites to never save passwords for. She quickly realized that he had been visiting dating sites in secret, and was also able to determine that he was still an active member of some of the sites. As one might expect, this led to a breakup.

Should the Firefox uninstaller offer to delete profile data, like most game uninstallers do, or at least notify users that profile data was not deleted? Can it do so in a way that won't confuse users too much or cause accidental dataloss? What about platforms like Mac where most programs (including Firefox) do not have an installer or uninstaller?

Apple's recent security update to rsync broke my non-clobber Firefox builds. I would get errors like:

rsync -a ../../dist/bin/ ../../dist/DeerParkDebug.app/Contents/MacOS
rsync: delete_file: unlink "/Users/admin/trunk/mozilla/fx-debug-shared-gcc401/dist/DeerParkDebug.app/Contents/MacOS/mangle" failed: Invalid argument (22)
rsync: symlink "/Users/admin/trunk/mozilla/fx-debug-shared-gcc401/dist/DeerParkDebug.app/Contents/MacOS/mangle" -> "/Users/admin/trunk/mozilla/fx-debug-shared-gcc401/nss/mangle" failed: File exists (17)
rsync: delete_file: unlink "/Users/admin/trunk/mozilla/fx-debug-shared-gcc401/dist/DeerParkDebug.app/Contents/MacOS/shlibsign" failed: Invalid argument (22)
rsync: symlink "/Users/admin/trunk/mozilla/fx-debug-shared-gcc401/dist/DeerParkDebug.app/Contents/MacOS/shlibsign" -> "/Users/admin/trunk/mozilla/fx-debug-shared-gcc401/nss/shlibsign" failed: File exists (17)
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-23/rsync/main.c(717)

Phil Ringnalda was having the same problem, and pointed out this Fink news item to me. Since I already had Fink installed, I worked around the problem by installing Fink's rsync:

fink selfupdate-cvs
fink update-all
fink install rsync

That required doing a sudo gcc_select 4.0, which in turn required blowing away my Firefox dist directory. (I had switched to GCC 3.3 when I first got the PowerBook because Firefox didn't build reliably under GCC 4 at the time.)

Update 2006-01-13: Apple released another security update todayish, which fixed the problem.