1259497 - Site save directory info (content-prefs.sqlite) should NOT be synchronized to other machines

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[fireattack [:fireattack]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2638.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Currently, the settings about where to save files for each site will be saved into the file "content-prefs.sqlite" in profile folder and this file WILL be synchronized.

It makes no sense since user may have totally different folder structures on different machines. 

For example, I once used "save image as" function on certain site on my desktop computer to, say, "desktop" folder.

Now when I go to my second computer, my laptop, and do the same thing on that site (trying to save an image), the default folder for "save as.." dialog would be that path. However, obviously I don't or cannot visit that folder any more because the user name on two computers are not the same.

Before I thought it's about settings of "browser.download.dir", "browser.open.lastDir" or  "browser.download.lastDir" and opened an invalid ticket (bug 1244806). 

But today I encountered this bug again on my laptop, and after some investigating I found the real culprit is that content-prefs.sqlite. When I open that file with DB Browser I can see lots of entries such as 

"331"	"294"	"3"	"C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop"	"0"

in table of "prefs". Where 294 is the ID for certain site.

I use "Administrator" as user on my desktop, hence this kind of records. Apparently it shouldn't by synced to my notebook because I don't have privilege to access that folder on my notebook.

Comment 1

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Neither content-prefs.sqlite itself, nor any of its contents, no any of the browser.download.* preferences are synced using Firefox Sync. If they were, there would also be huge issues when Sync was configured on different platforms (eg, Windows paths will upset Mac in all cases) and we aren't seeing similar reports or complaints. Unfortunately I can't speculate on what is causing your problems.