1176600 - Remove or move (to suite) defunct prefs listed in our m-c prefs/all.js files (and therefore about:config)

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[behrang.farnaz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/600.3.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.3 Safari/537.85.12

Steps to reproduce:

Tried to use these preferences in about:config:

accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart
accessibility.typeaheadfind.enabletimeout
accessibility.usebrailledisplay
accessibility.usetexttospeech
application.use_ns_plugin_finder
autocomplete.grab_during_popup
autocomplete.ungrab_during_mode_switch
browser.chrome.toolbar_style
browser.download.debug
browser.EULA.version
browser.popups.showPopupBlocker
capability.policy.default.SOAPCall.invokeVerifySourceHeader
dom.idle-observers-api.enabled
dom.mozContacts.enabled
dom.workers.maxPerDomain
intl.fallbackCharsetList.ISO-8859-1
layout.frame_rate.precise
media.audio_data.enabled
middlemouse.openNewWindow
network.http.bypass-cachelock-threshold
prefs.converted-to-utf8
print.always_cache_old_pres
print.print_extra_margin
print.print_paper_size
profile.confirm_automigration
profile.manage_only_at_launch
profile.migration_behavior
profile.migration_directory
profile.seconds_until_defunct
security.ask_for_password
security.checkloaduri
security.password_lifetime
security.xpconnect.plugin.unrestricted
toolbar.customization.usesheet
toolkit.asyncshutdown.timeout.crash
ui.key.saveLink.shift
viewmanager.do_doublebuffering 


Actual results:

They have no effect.


Expected results:

The preferences in about:config should be updated as preferences are added and removed during evolution. For the above preferences, they actually have been removed from source code (checked the source code) in some previous versions but they are still in about:config. Even, for some of them I found some documentation explicitly stating that they removed the feature. However, they are still available in about:config. It is not possible for everyone to go and check the source code to see if there is a bug, or h/she is doing something wrong, or this is just an intentional change while about:config has not been updated.

Comment 1

[dagger.bugzilla]

Note that some of these (e.g. browser.chrome.toolbar_style, middlemouse.openNewWindow, ui.key.saveLink.shift, ...) are in use in comm-central.

There are also some cases of code in the tree that uses string concatenation to remove a common prefix from a set of prefs, which makes those prefs a pain to search for (e.g. browser.urlbar.delay). I didn't find any examples in your list, but I didn't check them all (and, well, like I said, they're a pain to search for).

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

As noted, a bunch of these (also e.g. usesheet, the a11y prefs) are in use in comm-central.

They could be moved there, but that would require more investigation for the individual cases you list. I can mentor this, but I don't have time to actively develop on this myself.