1488121 - user.js setting isn't taking priority over pref.js setting

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[smooeycom]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Installed fresh Firefox Quantum, it built the pref.js file. I added my own user.js file in profile directory and one setting won't take priority over the one in pref.js file. 




Actual results:

After installing fresh Firefox Quantum 16.0.2 version of Firefox, the pref.js file was automatically created. This pref: user_pref("devtools.onboarding.telemetry.logged", true); 

Was set to "true". I made user.js file with the same line but made it "false", and opened Firefox and opened "about:config" and searched for "telemetry" and it showed it as being set to "true". The only way to change it is in about:config. Shouldn't "user.js" take priority over "pref.js" settings? 


Expected results:

Settings made in "user.js" should take lead/priority over "pref.js" settings. But in this case, it doesn't. The only way to change it is manually in "about:config". 

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Preferences/A_brief_guide_to_Mozilla_preferences

Comment 1

[smooeycom]

It was meant to read "61.0.2" not 16.0.2 lol.

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

The way that preference works is if you set it to false, we'll see that, log the telemetry and set it to true:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/devtools/startup/devtools-startup.js#330

user_pref only sets the user value of the preference. Anything within Firefox is free to change the value to something else.

If your goal was to not have the telemetry be sent, you should set the pref to true, not false.

Comment 3

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

Thanks Mike, I'll close this bug as invalid.

Comment 4

[smooeycom]

Thanks for reply. So basically just let it alone and it's already taken care of? I was following these "guides" to making Firefox more "hardened", maybe they're not sure what they're doing lol. 

https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js
https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/blob/master/user.js

https://vikingvpn.com/cybersecurity-wiki/browser-security/guide-hardening-mozilla-firefox-for-privacy-and-security

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

> Thanks for reply. So basically just let it alone and it's already taken care of? I was following these "guides" to making Firefox more "hardened", maybe they're not sure what they're doing lol. 

I would leave it alone. I'm not a big fan of these kind of guides.

Comment 6

[smooeycom]

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #5)
> > Thanks for reply. So basically just let it alone and it's already taken care of? I was following these "guides" to making Firefox more "hardened", maybe they're not sure what they're doing lol. 
> 
> I would leave it alone. I'm not a big fan of these kind of guides.

Alright, thanks Mike! Yeah, I'm usually big on privacy, and would love the perfect hardened (privacy/security) browser, but yet when they are hardened, you're limited at the same time. Like Epic Browser, Brave Browser, etc etc... can't install your own extensions you want. I always loved and used Firefox in the past when it was faster like early 2000's to 2005 or some such, then some how it got slow and used a lot of resources, then again later down road it was faster again lol. I'll just skip the guides then, too much work for nothing. There's no time to enjoy the browser, when you're doing all this modification to it etc.