1121252 - Default search engine Choice in Firefox 35 not respected on update

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Sean Kerner]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20150108202552

Steps to reproduce:

1) Had an existing Firefox 34 browser running on Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) (also tested on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1) where the user (me!) had chosen Google as the default instead of Bing/Yahoo.
2) Updated the browser via the inplace update (about firefox button/)



Actual results:

 After the Firefox 35 update (in place, from the existing browser), Yahoo was the default -- not respecting the exiting user choice.


Expected results:

Google (or whatever the default is that the user had specified in Firefox 34) should have stayed the default.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This very much shouldn't happen. Florian, any idea on how to debug / figure out why this isn't working the way it should in this case?

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> This very much shouldn't happen.

I'm not completely sure. Did you have Yahoo as the default engine in 34, then switched to Google, then go Yahoo again when updating to 35? Or did you just have Google in 34.0 and then got updated to 35?

> Florian, any idea on how to debug / figure
> out why this isn't working the way it should in this case?

No idea right now, I can't reproduce the issue. We would probably need more information:
- do you know which exact version of Firefox you were running before the update? (Was it 34.0 or 34.0.5?)
- are you in north America?

Comment 3

[Sean Kerner]

on the browses i tested - 
All were North America
All were running latest update - (so would be 34.0.5?)
Google was set by the user as default in 34.x (when they got the 34.x update in 2014).

hope that helps and pls let me know if there is anything else i can send/do to help replicate the issue at your end

Comment 4

[Steve Clark]

Same thing happened to me today after update.  After setting my search back to google, I noticed two entries in about:config that could be related:

 browser.search.defaultenginename user set Google
 browser.search.defaultenginename.US default data:text/plain,browser.search.defaultenginename.US=Yahoo

Comment 5

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

Sean: it would be useful if you could confirm that you were running 34.0, and not 34.0.5, before you upgraded to Firefox 35.

Assuming so, then it's possible you encountered an edge case in our testing of the default switch.

Firefox 34 was only offered to a small percentage of our users between Dec 1st and Dec 8th (by throttling the update rate). To have received this update, you would have needed to either be in the lucky ~2% who happened to get the update offer, or you would have needed to manually check for updates (using the about dialog), which isn't affected by throttling. Given how on top of our updates you are, I'm guessing you probably manually checked for updates in this time period :)

Firefox 34.0 did not have a change in the default search engine (Google->Yahoo), only 34.0.5 did. However, using the 34.0 "whatsnew" page, which opens after an update, we experimented with a few different ways to introduce the upcoming new default, and made it possible for users to get a "sneak peak" of the new default (Yahoo), by switching their active search engine automatically (or after a prompt). If you encountered one of these, then you would have seen a switch to Yahoo in the search bar, but this would have been recorded as a "switch to a non-default engine". If you then went and switched back to Google yourself, that was therefore recorded as "switch to the default engine". Given that, during subsequent upgrade to 35 (which contained the same default change as 34.0.5), would have seen that you were using the old default (Google), and thus switched you to the new default (Yahoo).

The takeaway is this: it was possible, under these specific set of conditions, for you to get an "automated" switch to Yahoo twice - once on update to 34.0, and then again on update to 35.0, *if* you switched from Yahoo->Google after the first "automated switch", while still running 34.0. This can only have happened once (it won't be possible for it to happen again), and only if you were one of the "lucky few" to get 34.0 instead of going directly from 33.X->34.0.5 (most of our users).

I'm going to close this out since this was a one-time fluke, not something we can go back in time and fix, but hopefully that explanation helps.

Comment 6

[Sean Kerner]

Attachment: about:config for search choice

Comment 7

[Sean Kerner]

hi gavin - honestly unknown if the all three machine i tested were 34 or 34.0.5.
Though I do know that all the machines tested (OS X, Linux and Windows) did see Yahoo as the new default, when Firefox 34 was loaded the first time (at which point, the default was changed by the user to Google)

Does the about:config that Steve mentioned above:
 browser.search.defaultenginename user set Google
 browser.search.defaultenginename.US default data:text/plain,browser.search.defaultenginename.US=Yahoo

Have any impact? (i attached my screenshot showing the same).

Thanks for the explanation -

Comment 8

[Sean Kerner]

Attachment: about:config for search choice (CORRECTED!

Comment 10

[Sean Kerner]

a duplicate - nice. So i'm not the only one that this issue (and it's not unique, though if Gavin is right it's rate).

Eager to see what happens for Firefox 36.

Comment 12

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

Sean: you can simulate an upgrade to 36 right now by just using a beta build (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#beta) with the same profile, it would be helpful to confirm that goes as expected.

Comment 13

[Sean Kerner]

Just confirmed that on Win7 (so far) a Firefox 35 to 36 beta build update respected the user selected search engine. Will check on *nix/OS X next and will report if anything is different.