1162255 - about:passwords not loading all passwords

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P1)

Description

[Allison Naaktgeboren :ally]

Bill noted in yesterday's meeting that about:passwords sometimes does not load all his passwords. This might be a sync or sqlite issue, but it needs to be investigated.

Comment 1

[Allison Naaktgeboren :ally]

Bill, could you fill me/us/the universe in on what you've noticed in more detail?

Comment 2

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

See bug 1153224 for some Sync issues with passwords. Margaret and I have seen those errors.

Comment 3

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Yes, in my experience, the issue was that I was missing synced passwords (bug 1153224).

I would assume that's the issue Bill also saw. The about:passwords UI logic is pretty simple, so I think it's much more likely that the logins storage is missing logins, rather than that we're not displaying some logins.

Comment 4

[Bill Maggs (bmaggs)]

(In reply to :Margaret Leibovic from comment #3)
> Yes, in my experience, the issue was that I was missing synced passwords
> (bug 1153224).
> 
> I would assume that's the issue Bill also saw. The about:passwords UI logic
> is pretty simple, so I think it's much more likely that the logins storage
> is missing logins, rather than that we're not displaying some logins.

Nope, my passwords on Nightly up until recently were syncing passwords fine, just not showing favicons.  cleared passwords that I noticed they have not come back. Which is why I can't attach a screenshot. Of about 150 logins there were only (presumably cached) favicons for about 5 of them.

Comment 5

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Bill Maggs from comment #4)
> (In reply to :Margaret Leibovic from comment #3)
> > Yes, in my experience, the issue was that I was missing synced passwords
> > (bug 1153224).
> > 
> > I would assume that's the issue Bill also saw. The about:passwords UI logic
> > is pretty simple, so I think it's much more likely that the logins storage
> > is missing logins, rather than that we're not displaying some logins.
> 
> Nope, my passwords on Nightly up until recently were syncing passwords fine,
> just not showing favicons.  cleared passwords that I noticed they have not
> come back. Which is why I can't attach a screenshot. Of about 150 logins
> there were only (presumably cached) favicons for about 5 of them.

Not showing favicons is likely bug 1140267.

To be clear, this bug here sounds like it's about entire logins missing, not just their favicons.

Comment 6

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Bill Maggs from comment #4)

> Nope, my passwords on Nightly up until recently were syncing passwords fine,
> just not showing favicons.  cleared passwords that I noticed they have not
> come back.

Bill, are you saying you cleared passwords on your device (desktop? Android?)?

If so, how did you do so, and what did you expect to happen?

Comment 7

[Bill Maggs (bmaggs)]

Richard, 

I unticked th eSave Passwords box, then retocked it, and they didn't show up. Eventually updating fixed the problem.

Comment 8

[:Margaret Leibovic]

I think the issue here is that there is just confusion about what happens when you decide to clear your data. When I talked with Bill about this issue a few weeks ago, he said that he cleared his saved passwords from "Clear private data", and then was confused that there was no way to sync them back.

rnewman, is there a more general bug filed about that?

Since this issue isn't about about:passwords, I think we should just close this out.

Comment 9

[Bill Maggs (bmaggs)]

(In reply to :Margaret Leibovic from comment #8)
> I think the issue here is that there is just confusion about what happens
> when you decide to clear your data. When I talked with Bill about this issue
> a few weeks ago, he said that he cleared his saved passwords from "Clear
> private data", and then was confused that there was no way to sync them back.
> 
> rnewman, is there a more general bug filed about that?
> 
> Since this issue isn't about about:passwords, I think we should just close
> this out.

Maragret, 

Sorry I mispoke back then. It was a sync change I made.

Comment 10

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to :Margaret Leibovic from comment #8)
> I think the issue here is that there is just confusion about what happens
> when you decide to clear your data. When I talked with Bill about this issue
> a few weeks ago, he said that he cleared his saved passwords from "Clear
> private data", and then was confused that there was no way to sync them back.
> 
> rnewman, is there a more general bug filed about that?

There's a lot of historical discussion over the past four or five years, particularly for form history (e.g., Bug 578694, Bug 735532, Bug 487558). I don't think there's a specific meta bug to fix this all up.

Our most recent thinking is that if deletions don't always propagate, then the user should be forced to interact with Sync at the point of clearing their data and choose a sane option. (Unfortunately, Sync is full of leaky abstractions, which I note below.)

In other words, "clear my data" is ambiguous with synchronization in the picture, and we should not be phrasing our UI in this way.

The user might want to do any of these things:

* I'm trying to disconnect my device from Sync and wipe it at the same time. Do both. Deletions won't sync.

* I want to delete this data everywhere. Sync the deletions.
  (a) I want to wipe a particular collection, even if this device doesn't have the data!
  (b) I want to delete the stuff I can see on this device, but not necessarily stuff this device doesn't know about. This is super leaky.

* I think that this data is already on the sync server and other machines, and I'm clearing my device because I want to re-sync whatever's on the server. We should do this sanely: "it looks like your server only has 15 passwords, but your local device has 170. Are you sure you want to replace them?"

* [This is not common] I want to clear just this local device, and I acknowledge that Sync might make it come back at some point. This is basically what we do now, and it sucks.