What can be done to make profile data use safer and friendlier?

• Support Read Only access to profile data
• Allow merging/reconciling of profile data (Bookmarks, History, Cookies)
• Inactive profile users should flush their changes and relinquish their lock(s)
• There should be a single universally recognizable lockfile
• Instead of tossing up a dialog and refusing to allow the user to use the profile data, we should let the user use the profile and start a thread to watch the profile lock/data. If the lock disappears we should acquire it and offer to reconcile the profile data
• Consider splitting the locks

What can be done to catch stale locks?

• We can ping the computer to see if it's alive
• For local processes, we can check to see if the process actually has the lock file open

What can not be done to the profile lock?

• The global lock can't be deleted. Deleting it would result in a big backwards compatibility problem: an old browser (like Netscape 6) would think that the profile is unlocked and ignore the new split locks.