1425199 - "browser.search.widget.inNavBar" not working with config files

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Confix]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20171005074949

Steps to reproduce:

I've tried to set the "browser.search.widget.inNavBar"-value to true in the config file (like http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locking_preferences ). In this way, I wanted to show the search bar for new users / profiles by default.


Actual results:

The search bar was not shown in new profiles. With
>> defaultPref("browser.search.widget.inNavBar", true); <<
the result result in about:config was a "modified by user" value (=false), with
>> lockPref("browser.search.widget.inNavBar", true); <<
the value was locked in about:config, but the search bar still didn't appeared.


Expected results:

When this value is set to true in about:config (or via about:preferences#search), the search bar does appear. It would be handy, if the switch would work like this when pref is set in the config file.

Comment 1

[Confix]

This affects Firefox 57 and above, not 52.

Comment 2

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Paolo, as you added this pref can you take a look at this?

Comment 3

[:Paolo Amadini]

This preference is designed to be changed only while the browser is running. The CustomizableUI state is currently serialized to a different preference, and it always takes precedence at startup to avoid inconsistent situations.

Setting the visibility of the search bar before the browser starts is a feature that could be considered for the policy engine that is being developed:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/EnterprisePolicies#Policy_Engine