1534819 - New tab page - pinned sites sync between machines even when history and bookmarks aren't synced

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Sync, defect, P3)

Description

[kbhove]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0

Steps to reproduce:

Have bookmarks and history NOT selected on the sync settings page. After which I've pinned a website on the new tab page on my HOME machine.

Actual results:

The pinned website is pinned on the new tab page on my WORK machine.

Expected results:

The bookmark and history check-boxes not being ticked should mean that the pinned tab shouldn't sync with my work machine.

Comment 1

[Lina Butler (ex-Mozilla)]

That's a good point! Pinned top sites sync as part of preferences/settings, not bookmarks or history, because that's where they're stored...but that's an implementation detail. (On the other hand, though, it is a preference in some sense—and we do sync other URL-related prefs that wouldn't make sense to tie to history).

I think this will end up being WONTFIX, but I've CCed Alex, our PM, just in case.

Regardless of what happens with this bug, though, you can still toggle the services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.pinned pref in about:config to false to prevent your pinned tabs from syncing. This mechanism works for other prefs, too.

Comment 2

[kbhove]

(In reply to Lina Cambridge (she/her) [:lina] from comment #1)

That's a good point! Pinned top sites sync as part of preferences/settings, not bookmarks or history, because that's where they're stored...but that's an implementation detail. (On the other hand, though, it is a preference in some sense—and we do sync other URL-related prefs that wouldn't make sense to tie to history).

I think this will end up being WONTFIX, but I've CCed Alex, our PM, just in case.

Regardless of what happens with this bug, though, you can still toggle the services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.pinned pref in about:config to false to prevent your pinned tabs from syncing. This mechanism works for other prefs, too.

Thanks for the workaround. I understand your comment, and the logic, however from an end user's perspective, this would likely lead to some surprises. I pinned Reddit as a top site on my home browser, but I explicitly do not want my work and personal activity history to sync, so I was very surprised when on my company computer Reddit was pinned also. Now Reddit's harmless enough, but I expect that if other users pinned something more NSFW than that, it could cause issues as it's not at all transparent that Firefox will behave that way.