1170990 - Pocket cannot be disabled (in existing profiles)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1163917

(Firefox :: Pocket, defect)

Description

[Sören Hentzschel]

Several users in the german Firefox forum reported that Pocket cannot be disabled. Pocket can be disabled in new profiles but not in existing profiles. I can confirm the problem with my Firefox profile.

STR:

1. set browser.pocket.enabled to false
2. restart Firefox

Expected:

Pocket should be disabled.

Actual result:

Pocket is still in bookmarks menu, context menu etc.

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I believe bug 1163917 fixed this, although the latter comments there indicate users with existing beta profiles wouldn't automatically pick up the fix.

In any case, the recommended way to disable Pocket is to simply remove the button, which should correctly remove the other integration points. It's simplest to re-enable the pref, and then remove it per https://support.mozilla.org/kb/disable-pocket-firefox

Comment 2

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

Using the latest m-c commit I can still reproduce this. We check |getPlacementOfWidget| and assign the return value to the hidden attribute. http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/base/content/browser-places.js#1565

This works perfectly well if we have hidden the button from the toolbar manually, but only using the |browser.pocket.enabled = false| value in about:config this check still returns true and therefore the Bookmark menu item and the context menu item is shown.

Of course, removing the toolbar icon via context menu is the way to go here, but there still might be users who only disable it via the about:config pref. This is confusing to them since the Pocket button will never show in the GUI, but still they have the bookmark and context menu item. The button is not initialized if the setting is set to "false" (http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/components/customizableui/CustomizableWidgets.jsm#1066) but the menu items are not checked against the preference.

This has also come up in the governance mailing list as a bug. There it was used an another reason why this is broken and shouldn't have been done in the first place: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/2PYq2w8tejs/-lk-VruXBRcJ

I have spent about two hours to try to get that working, but passing "true" as a second paremter to the function doesn't help either. So somehow the button is still registered in the CustomizeableWidget list, but just not shown. I don't know this code very well, but hopefully somebody who knows it might give some insight here. I think we should fix this, since users expect to not see Pocket anywhere when they have set |browser.pocket.enabled| to false.

Comment 3

[Michael Kohler [:mkohler]]

Wait, never mind. This indeed seems like resetting a pref works. Though this is really bad if the user has to do it manually. The pref is: browser.toolbarbuttons.introduced.pocket-button as mentioned in the bug this was duped to. Since this doesn't seem to be the case for release, I'm DUPING this again. Sorry.

Nevertheless, for Beta users really bad.

Comment 4

[Alice Wyman]

See also: Bug 1171569 - browser.pocket.enabled should fully disable the Pocket integration