1111972 - Firefox requires you to enter the master password if sync in enabled.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[bostem01]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0
Build ID: 20141126041045

Steps to reproduce:

Whenever starting Firefox when sync in enabled.


Actual results:

Need to enter my master password for the Software Security Device.


Expected results:

There should not be a password prompt on start up. It should only pop-up if the program requires sensitive information (and not on start up)

Comment 1

[Marcin]

I can confirm that. In addition FF asks for master password when deleting history entries (why?!)

Comment 2

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

If you have a master password set, we store your sync credentials in the password manager. We therefore need you to unlock your master password in order to enable syncing.

Comment 3

[Marcin]

so how did it work before ff34?!
this feature is terrible when you frequently open and close browser (like me, when testing pages, for example). maybe there should be an option to sync without asking for master pasword? maybe sync password should be stored separetely - not in common password manager?

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Between Firefox 29 and Firefox 34 we did not support syncing passwords if you had a master password set, which was another limitation that bothered many master password users.

It is fairly well known that the experience of having a master password set in Firefox is not ideal, for various reasons. We may end up investing some effort in improving that feature (or removing it) in the near future.

Comment 5

[u373683]

You should remove or improve it (literally right now) as its unusable this way and that bad.

Someone needs to finally get to this.

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to esschalm from comment #5)
> You should remove or improve it (literally right now) as its unusable this
> way and that bad.

There's nothing identified that we can do other than to silently not sync while the master-password is locked. YMMMV, but IMO that would be worse (after all, these users have explicitly opted in to both Sync and master-password, so presumably want them both to actually work)

> Someone needs to finally get to this.

Making demands about what other people should do isn't helpful - unless by "someone" you mean "you", in which case you should just go for it and upload a patch.

Comment 7

[u373683]

(In reply to Mark Hammond [:markh] from comment #6)
> (In reply to esschalm from comment #5)
> > You should remove or improve it (literally right now) as its unusable this
> > way and that bad.
> 
> There's nothing identified that we can do other than to silently not sync
> while the master-password is locked. YMMMV, but IMO that would be worse
> (after all, these users have explicitly opted in to both Sync and
> master-password, so presumably want them both to actually work)

As another person said, "this feature is terrible when you frequently open and close browser". I have Firefox clean history, cache, etc during closure and then reopen for a fresh browsing experience. Apparently, you should try it and find out how bad of an experience it is.

> 
> > Someone needs to finally get to this.
> 
> Making demands about what other people should do isn't helpful - unless by
> "someone" you mean "you", in which case you should just go for it and upload
> a patch.

If "You should" is demanding to you than I wonder what "You better or else" would be. It was by no means being demanding but stating how **** an experience having the password dialog popup when your doing something else every time the browser is reopened. If you don't like it, don't make a comment.

Comment 8

[Albert Scheiner [:alberts]]

esschalm, please see the etiquette guide > "Commenting" #2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html