1102021 - Refresh Firefox should (offer to) remove (parts of) user profile

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 926877

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[marty grivjack]

Attachment: AdwCleaner[R0].txt

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0
Build ID: 20141113143407

Steps to reproduce:

OS: Win10 Preview
I tried common effective malware removers to no avail. Adwcleaner got close, showing a persistent regenerative file at C:\users\user\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\x68cssus.default\user.js

Suspect Rainmeter and Optimizer Pro (incidental software installed with Rainmeter) software.

Finally, after cleansing the registry, and seeing that uninstalling Mozilla Firefox DID NOT remove this hidden system folder, I decided to delete the MOZILLA folder under ...\Roaming

The malware appears to be attributed to an attempt to utilize Rainmeter open source software to measure CPU temperatures. 

Adwcleaner report file attached. Shows allegedly suspect files located in Roaming\Mozilla folder. 


Actual results:

SUCCESS. Firefox is stable now and does not persistently flag the false Java version error. 


Expected results:

Mere mortals would have dumped the Win 10 Preview and started over. I did not, and solved the issue, as far as it affected my Firefox browser. I DID NOT want to have to resort to the G browser or the E browser which seemed to be unaffected by this malware variant.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Yeah, I'm not sure if the installer asks to remove your user profile data - which user.js is a part of - it should offer to do so if it doesn't already. rstrong? (I thought this was filed already but I can't find it)

Comment 2

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

There is an in product ability to fix these sort of issues (Refresh Nightly) and this should be handled by that especially since the windows installer is windows only. There is also a bug to detect when an reinstall or uninstall / install has happened and provide those same options for all platforms.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Robert Strong [:rstrong] (use needinfo to contact me) from comment #2)
> There is an in product ability to fix these sort of issues (Refresh Nightly)
> and this should be handled by that especially since the windows installer is
> windows only. There is also a bug to detect when an reinstall or uninstall /
> install has happened and provide those same options for all platforms.

Refresh already does this - it removes everything apart from history, saved passwords, etc. In particular, it'll remove add-ons, userchrome/content css/js things, and the prefs (except your homepage, which we'll keep).

It sounds like this is essentially a dupe of the installer vs. firefox reset/refresh integration.