1517147 - Configuration experiments.enabled is not visible in about:config

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Shield :: General, defect)

Description

[Kristopher Ives]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0

Steps to reproduce:

Go to about:config and search for a way to disable Experiments in Firefox


Actual results:

No such configuration is displayed


Expected results:

It should show `experiments.enabled` or whatever configuration can be modified to disable experiments.

Ideally this configuration would be present in the regular settings GUI as well so that regular users can easily disable it since Mozilla is using it for controversial things like running advertisements.

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/pushloghtml?fromchange=f291b07fa1f869fd3f9af9f5fe940d47b842edcf&tochange=98389f291fe61e622267ba3e5e99792e6f5d6350

(In reply to Kristopher Ives from comment #0)
> Go to about:config and search for a way to disable Experiments in Firefox

"Telemetry Experiments have been replaced by Shield Studies." —bug 1415284, comment 0
Bug 1420908 removed the feature, including the experiments.enabled preference.


I'm also curious what preference "Allow Nightly to install and run studies" corresponds to, since I don't notice any changes when I toggle it. In any case, if you have administrator access, you can use enterprise policies to disable Shield Studies for all Firefox profiles:
https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/README.md#disablefirefoxstudies

Comment 2

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

The preference that controls studies (aka experiments) is app.shield.optoutstudies.enabled. The setting "Allow Nightly to install and run studies" is supposed to control that preference, but it doesn't seem to be working. I remember the logic here isn't very straight forward, so there might be something else going on, but these seems like a bug to me.

Comment 3

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

I looked further into this, and the UI doesn't change the preference if Normandy is already disabled by some other means, such as by disabling telemetry or by app.normandy.enabled. This isn't ideal, but it seems that we still respect users opting out of studies.