1415975 - web extension homepage breaks when shown at startup

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1418030

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, defect, P3)

Description

[Steven Harris]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. User has installed a Web Extension with a manifest setting for "chrome_settings_overrides.homepage" referencing a file internal to the extension
2. User has the "When Firefox starts" set to "Show your home page"
3. User restarts the browser and browser shows extensions homepage


Actual results:

The homepage shown to the user is a blank page


Expected results:

The homepage shown should be the extensions homepage

When the user clicks on the homepage button the products homepage displays correctly

FYI - this issue was observed close to 90% of the time for FF57, occasionally for FF56 and rarely (if ever) on earlier versions.

You can see this issue with the following product - http://free.atozmanuals.com/index.jhtml

Comment 1

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

I can't reproduce this in a recent Nightly build, the homepage from the extension is displayed on a restart.

Comment 2

[Steven Harris]

Andrew, thank you for jumping on this. 

I just reproduced the issue as reported on Aurora (Version: 58.0b1, Build ID: 20171103003834).

When attempting to reproduce on Nightly (Version: 51.0b1, Build ID: 20161115182233), with a new profile, here is what I get
1. Successfully install product (http://free.atozmanuals.com/index.jhtml)
2. Say no to secondary offer
3. Ctrl+T -- correctly shows products new tab page
4. Here's where it get's weird. 
5. Alt+Home -- shows Nightly Start Page
6. about:preferences - General shows that "When Nightly starts: Show my home page" with "Home Page: _Nightly Start Page_"
7. I confirmed that the manifest for the just installed extension correctly sets the home page by executing the following in the console of the extension: chrome.runtime.getManifest().chrome_settings_overrides.homepage -- returns "dynamicHomePage.html"

No matter what action I take, Alt+Home or clicking the Home button, I always get the "Nightly Start Page". Given this behavior it makes no sense to see what the restart behavior of Firefox is since Firefox seems to be confused with what the homepage is set to.

I have a colleague using a fresh VM who sees the same thing you are reporting.

Comment 3

[Steven Harris]

Update. Looking at the version that nightly returns 51.0b1, somethings not right. I will get back to you after I correct this. :(

Comment 4

[Steven Harris]

Second update - For reasons unknown to me, my Nightly instance got stuck on 51 (and said it was up-to-date). Downloading latest, I too see the correct behavior with Nightly.

Comment 5

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Support for setting the homepage from a webextension originally landed in Firefox 54.
As I understand it this isn't an issue with recent browsers, please re-open if I overlooked something.

Comment 6

[Steven Harris]

(In reply to Andrew Swan [:aswan] from comment #5)
> Support for setting the homepage from a webextension originally landed in
> Firefox 54.
> As I understand it this isn't an issue with recent browsers, please re-open
> if I overlooked something.

The above issue is reproducible on Aurora but not Nightly. When will the 'fix' that is in Nightly for this issue make it to Aurora and then stable?

Comment 7

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Aurora doesn't exist any more, do you mean dev edition?
Using specific version numbers might help here, also see https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

Comment 8

[Steven Harris]

We see this issue happening on Stable (57.0, Build ID: 20171112125346), therefore it is impacting our end users. We can reliably reproduce by installing into a new profile and then restarting. I am changing this ticket to UNCONFIRMED.