1146731 - passwords aren't loaded from logins.json any more / password list is empty after upgrade

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, defect)

Description

[abma]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Build ID: 20150321180105

Steps to reproduce:

upgrade to firefox 36.0.4


Actual results:

stored password list is empty. this happened on two machines (with a similar but not shared password list) , so unlikely a crash.


Expected results:

stored password list isn't empty

Comment 1

[abma]

python can open/read the file:

json.loads(open('logins.json', 'r').read())

its valid json!


how/where to get log messages from firefox? does it show somehow debug messages about loading logins.json?

Comment 2

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

WFM. I created a new profile, logged into gmail, closed Firefox, checked that logins.json is present in the profile, restarted and checked Options -> Security -> Saved passwords. The login was there.

There's 'signon.debug' preference you can set, but I'm not sure it will give you enough useful information.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:Password_Manager_Debugging

Did you check permissions on the files in your profile? Did you use pre-release versions of Firefox?

To fix, try backing up your profile, then using "refresh firefox" or "reset firefox" procedure.

To figure out what happened, try creating a new profile and copying logins.json, then other files there. If you find what in your profile makes logins.json ignored, you're golden.

Comment 3

[Török Edwin]

I just had similar trouble with password-manager on upgrade: only very few sites showed up in the password manager, and those that did had all the wrong password: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=790498

Turns out I have both a logins.json and a signons.sqlite, and after finding this bug I found a woraround:
 * backup logins.json
 * delete logins.json
 * open about:config and set signon.importedFromSqlite to false
 * upgrade Firefox again (31.7.0esr-1~deb8u1 -> 38.0.1-5, or 31.7.0esr-1~deb8u1 -> 39.0~b5-1)
 * check site passwords

Everything seems to be working now, so I must've had an old logins.json and all the passwords rotated/changed in signons.sqlite. (FWIW logins.json had 12 entries, while signons.sqlite had 45, now logins.json has 45 again).

Perhaps Firefox should check for newer passwords in signons.sqlite and import again, or at least warn that passwords in the password manager may be out of date and offer the user the ability to (re)import them.

Comment 4

[Török Edwin]

I don't know whether this bug is truly resolved or not, I haven't seen it occur again because I switched from using Firefox's builtin password manager to passwordstore.org and https://github.com/browserpass/browserpass plugin.
The passwords are stored gpg encrypted in a git repository, so I know they don't get lost when upgrading Firefox.