This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. nsIObserver topics for profile changing. Profile changing happens in phases in the order given below. An observer may register separately for each phase of the process depending on its needs. "profile-change-teardown" All async activity must be stopped in this phase. Typically, the application level observer will close all open windows. This is the last phase in which the subject's vetoChange() method may still be called. The next notification will be either profile-change-teardown-veto or profile-before-change. "profile-before-change" Called before the profile has changed. Use this notification to prepare for the profile going away. If a component is holding any state which needs to be flushed to a profile-relative location, it should be done here. "profile-do-change" Called after the profile has changed. Do the work to respond to having a new profile. Any change which affects others must be done in this phase. "profile-after-change" Called after the profile has changed. Use this notification to make changes that are dependent on what some other listener did during its profile-do-change. For example, to respond to new preferences. "profile-initial-state" Called after all phases of a change have completed. Typically in this phase, an application level observer will open a new window. Contexts for profile changes. These are passed as the someData param to the observer's Observe() method. "startup" Going from no profile to a profile. The following topics happen in this context: profile-do-change profile-after-change "shutdown-persist" The user is logging out and whatever data the observer stores for the current profile should be released from memory and saved to disk. The following topics happen in this context: profile-change-net-teardown profile-change-teardown profile-before-change See https://wiki.mozilla.org/XPCOM_Shutdown for more details about the shutdown process. NOTE: Long ago there was be a "shutdown-cleanse" version of shutdown which was intended to clear profile data. This is no longer sent and observer code should remove support for it.