1122491 - Navigating to about:preferences while Responsive Design is enabled results in an error thrown by content.js

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(DevTools :: Responsive Design Mode, defect)

Description

[Andrei Vaida [:avaida]]

Reproducible on: 
Aurora 37.0a2 (2015-01-15) and below.

Affected platform(s): 
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit, Windows 8.1 64-bit, Mac OS X 10.9.5.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Launch Firefox.
2. Enable Responsive Design from the "Developer Tools" → "Responsive Design View" menu.
3. Open the Browser Console from the "Developer Tools" → "Browser Console" menu.
4. Using the Location Bar, go to about:preferences.

Expected result:
There are no errors displayed for this action and about:preferences is loaded successfully and displayed in responsive mode.

Actual result:
- about:preferences is loaded with General section selected automatically, but it displays the data from the Search section instead.
- content.js:146:8 throws the following error in the Browser Console:
> TypeError: preference.setElementValue is not a function
- Starting with Firefox 35.0 (20150108202552) and below, the line that throws the error varies a bit:
> TypeError: preference.setElementValue is not a function content.js:118

Regression range (m-c):
- Last good revision: 770de5942471 (2013-11-05)
- First bad revision: 9ba3faa35c96 (2013-11-06)
- Pushlog: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=770de5942471&tochange=9ba3faa35c96

Additional notes:
- On Nightly 38.0a1 (2015-01-15) this error message is no longer displayed and is replaced by:
> unsafe CPOW usage is thrown TabState.jsm:96:0
- This issue is reproducible with and without e10s enabled.

Comment 1

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

The new RDM UI shipping in Firefox 52 exits RDM when going to parent process pages like this, so there is no chance for this error to happen anymore.