1009419 - Bookmarks with blank titles are replaced by the text 'null' when sync'd

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1360872

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[superandy47]

Attachment: Firefox bookmark sync issue.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:29.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/29.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140506152807

Steps to reproduce:

Remove title text on RSS feeds in the bookmark toolbar to conserve space. Synchronise bookmarks using Firefox's new sync options. Blank labels replaced by 'null' text upon sync.


Actual results:

RSS feeds on the bookmark toolbar are displayed with a label reading 'null' - see attached image.


Expected results:

RSS feed icons show with no text.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

rnewman, can I return the favour and ask you to look at this one? :-)

Comment 2

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Karl is this something you might want to have a look at (to confirm)? Thanks!

Comment 3

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

That ain't right.

The implication here is that Places is handing back a JS null rather than an empty string, which it shouldn't do. Sync is then thoughtfully syncing that up and back down.

Will test and see.

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

I can't reproduce this with Fx32, at least not with a single device.

What devices are you syncing with?

Comment 5

[Karl Thiessen [:kthiessen, he/him]]

I am also unable to reproduce, alas.

Comment 6

[superandy47]

Apologies - I should have mentioned that two devices were used to reproduce this, both on Windows 7.

If I create a bookmark on my work laptop (at which point the RSS feed titles are blank), then get home and open Firefox on my home desktop (Win7 x64), the bookmarks are updated with the 'null' text after syncing.

Annoyingly, this doesn't seem to be consistent - today, for example, the RSS titles remain blank after syncing (expected behaviour).

Comment 7

[superandy47]

I am also unable to reproduce this consistently. 

Initial steps taken:
1. Pre-Firefox 29, I had three RSS feeds on my bookmark toolbar with blank labels.
2. Following Fx29 install on my home PC, bookmark toolbar appeared as usual. I set up sync using a new Fx account.
3. Upon installing Fx29 on my work laptop and completing initial sync, the 'null' labels appeared. Fixed by going to Properties, changing nothing, then hitting 'Save'.
4. After normal use of my work laptop (likely to have involved some new bookmarks being made, but leaving the bookmarks in the toolbar alone) and returning home, the 'null' labels returned on my home PC.

While attempting to reproduce this bug today, I tried:
1. Adding a new RSS feed to the bookmark toolbar and leaving the label intact. This worked fine and synced across to the other device as expected.
2. Removed the label from the feed on work laptop, synced, shut it down. 
3. Switched on home PC, opened Firefox, synced, and the new bookmark appeared on the toolbar with no label, and this time, no 'null' text.
4. Repeated the process in the opposite direction, e.g. bookmarking and editing on device 2 then syncing to device 1. Still no 'null' label.

If I see the 'null' labels again, I will hopefully be able to provide more useful steps to reproduce.

Comment 8

[Andrei Vaida [:avaida]]

I was actually able to reproduce this 100% of the times on Nightly 37.0a1 (2014-12-01) and Aurora 36.0a2 (2014-12-01), using the following STR:
 1. Launch Firefox with a new profile
 2. Enable the Bookmarks Toolbar.
 3. Access 'twitter.com' using the Location Bar.
 4. From the Most Visited folder, drag & drop the 'twitter.com/' entry onto the Bookmarks Toolbar.
    * note: the entry might be called 'http://twitter.com/' on Mac OS X

I'm not sure if this is the same thing, as it doesn't involve any syncing, but perhaps it helps. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/22SXc71.png. Also, this happens across platforms: Windows 7 64-bit, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32-bit and Mac OS X 10.9.5.

Comment 9

[:Gijs (he/him)]

I can reproduce the issue in comment #8 on Nightly from this week. Marco, is this just a bookmarks & history bug in disguise?

Comment 10

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I think comment 8 and comment 0 are 2 different things.

Regarding this bug: null vs empty string in bookmarks titles is a very special thing that soon or later we should clarify in the API. For the new API trying to set a title to an empty string will basically set it to null, and the API will return an undefined title property. Then results and view can handle that as they prefer.
It's possible that Places hands a null to Sync, that would indeed be expected in some cases, what it's not expected is that Sync then syncs back a "null" string. Having empty strings and null as title are both supported by Places, they have always been supported (http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/places/nsINavBookmarksService.idl#401)

comment 8 looks instead related to a default title to use in the drag case, in that case you are dragging from an history view to the toolbar, it's possible we don't correctly populate the dataTransfer with a title, I wonder if there's a relation with e10s... Btw it's a different thing.

Comment 11

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Andrei Vaida, QA [:avaida] from comment #8)
> I was actually able to reproduce this 100% of the times on Nightly 37.0a1
> (2014-12-01) and Aurora 36.0a2 (2014-12-01), using the following STR:
>  1. Launch Firefox with a new profile
>  2. Enable the Bookmarks Toolbar.
>  3. Access 'twitter.com' using the Location Bar.
>  4. From the Most Visited folder, drag & drop the 'twitter.com/' entry onto
> the Bookmarks Toolbar.
>     * note: the entry might be called 'http://twitter.com/' on Mac OS X
> 
> I'm not sure if this is the same thing, as it doesn't involve any syncing,
> but perhaps it helps. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/22SXc71.png.
> Also, this happens across platforms: Windows 7 64-bit, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
> 32-bit and Mac OS X 10.9.5.

Andrei, can you file this separately in Firefox :: Bookmarks and History, per comment #10 ? Thanks!

Comment 12

[Andrei Vaida [:avaida]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #11)
> Andrei, can you file this separately in Firefox :: Bookmarks and History,
> per comment #10 ? Thanks!

Sure, I've filed Bug 1112618 on this matter and CC'ed both of you. Thank you for your feedback.