1547022 - Local build occasionally sets default search to Bing

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

I'm sorry for the lack of concrete STR but I've noticed several times that my local development build (i.e., "mach build; mach run") selects Bing as the default search engine. Several times I've noticed and clobbered and re-built and the default is back to Google, so I'm not sure exactly what got it into this state.

But I'm certain I never manually changed any search settings, is there anything I can look at when I have a build/profile in this state to help diagnose what happened?

Comment 1

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Ough, that sounds quite bad, monsieur! I'm n-i'ing Dale right away, because we recently landed big changes (as you're prolly aware) and would like to be on top of potential regressions.

Comment 2

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2019-04-27 at 10.07.08 AM.png

Even stranger, here's a screen shot where the location bar was offering Google search and about:newtab was offering Bing!

This behavior changes as I do new builds, wipe the profile etc. so please let me know what information I can gather when it is happening to help diagnose.

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The location bar vs newtab split is theoretically possible. The urlbar string has to have the engine name stored in a pref for performance reasons, and we won't change it whilst the string is displayed.

So it seems like something is setting Bing as the search engine in the background, maybe during startup or something.

Presumably this is an en-US build, but could you also let us know the values of browser.search.region and browser.search.countryCode.

If you can set browser.search.log to true, and record the console log of a case where it starts up, that might be useful as well.

Comment 4

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

browser.search.region is "US"
browser.search.countryCode is not set at all

Here's the raw log:

SearchService.init
_init start
SearchService.init
_loadEngines: start
_findEngines: looking for engines in JARs
_loadEngines: loading from cache directories
_loadEnginesFromCache: Loading 6 engines from cache
_addEngineToStore: Adding engine: "Bing"
_addEngineToStore: Adding engine: "DuckDuckGo"
_addEngineToStore: Adding engine: "Amazon.com"
_addEngineToStore: Adding engine: "Twitter"
_addEngineToStore: Adding engine: "eBay"
_addEngineToStore: Adding engine: "Wikipedia (en)"
_loadEngines: done using existing cache
_buildCache: Writing to cache file.
_buildSortedEngineList: building list
_buildSortedEngineList: using db for order
SearchService.init
_init: Completed _init
SearchService.init
getDefaultEngines: engineOrder: ({Google:1, Bing:2})
addEnginesFromExtension: [e-mail]
addEnginesFromExtension: [e-mail]
addEnginesFromExtension: [e-mail]
addEnginesFromExtension: [e-mail]
addEnginesFromExtension: [e-mail]
addEnginesFromExtension: [e-mail]
addEnginesFromExtension: [e-mail]
SearchService.init
getDefaultEngines: engineOrder: ({Google:1, Bing:2})
SearchService.init 3
getVisibleEngines: getting all visible engines
_buildCache: cache file written to disk.
_handleIgnoreListUpdated
SearchService.init
getDefaultEngines: engineOrder: ({Google:1, Bing:2})
SearchService.init
getDefaultEngines: engineOrder: ({Google:1, Bing:2})
SearchService.init
getDefaultEngines: engineOrder: ({Google:1, Bing:2})
SearchService.init
getDefaultEngines: engineOrder: ({Google:1, Bing:2})
Unkown category for SetEventRecordingEnabled.
SearchService.init
getVisibleEngines: getting all visible engines

Comment 5

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Yeh I have seen this from time to time as well, looking into it

Comment 7

[Brendan Dahl [:bdahl]]

I also ran into this today. Built a nightly optimized debug build from a clobber and bing was my default search engine. I tried running with an empty profile and it was back to google.

Comment 8

[Brian Birtles (:birtles)]

This happened to me today on Nightly (NOT a local build). It is the second time it has happened. The first time I just assumed I fat-fingered something but this time I saw the same thing as the screenshot in comment 2. This has happened to me on both Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows.

Comment 9

[Brian Birtles (:birtles)]

Attachment: Screenshot 2019-06-01

I didn't notice exactly when, but at some point later (it might have been as soon as I focused the location bar) the text in the location bar for the new tab page started referring to Bing instead of Google.

Comment 10

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The address bar caches the displayed engine string ("Search with <foo>") in a preference on startup to avoid initialising the search service really early.

I suspect what happened in this case is the Search Service decided the engine had changed, but the "Search with Google" string was already displayed. In that case, we won't normally change the string as the user hadn't initiated it and we don't want to change the UI right in front of them. It would switch to bing if you visited a url or probably just opening a new tab.

I think it would be interesting to keep an eye on this after today's nightlies / fresh pulls, as bug 1552559 has just landed which I think may help this.

Comment 11

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Yup, I have had a hard time reproducing this reliably enough to debug whats causing it, but I havent seen it in a build that has https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1552559 so thinking the double install was causing it

Comment 12

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

ok so havent been able to reproduce recently, I think this has been fixed