1557839 - Install/Update changing existing settings

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[arigato]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

Updated from 67 to 67.0.1

Actual results:

1. The option "Use recommended performance settings" was turned on, overriding my setting of a max of 4 content processes

2. Automatically install updates was re-enabled, overriding my setting of "Check for updates but let you choose to install them"

Expected results:

Those two settings should have been left as is. As should any existing settings.
These are NOT new settings where the default needs to be applied as a result. Neither are they changed settings where it might be (remotely) possible to justify reverting to a default instead of the setting that is closest to my existing one.
This is also not the first time this has happened. A couple of versions ago the auto update was also turned on. Though it's at least possible that was because I installed a beta to see if it fixed a crash issue I was having. (It didn't). However when you took away the option to never check for update in with version 64 (I think) , you did revert to auto install instead of the check and notify which would have made more sense given my prior setting. For the record, I did check for updates, just manually, and without the annoying notifications because I prefer to wait a week or so to hear of any critical issues that may arise.

Comment 1

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

These are the changes between 67 and 67.0.1, https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-release/pushloghtml?fromchange=2a7896ba9aa5d982abe01f859d771d411fda8101&tochange=e219b566bff653cc9c69534d85f53bc1c5e25940

I looked through the changes there and none would have affected the browser.preferences.defaultPerformanceSettings.enabled pref that controls the "Use recommended performance settings".

So, while you may have had "Use recommended performance settings" disabled, the value of 4 max content processes was the default at the time. This default value was increased to 8 in Firefox 66 via bug 1520227. Perhaps since your value was the default value, and the default value changed, you're now just using the new default value.

As for the "Check for updates but let you choose to install them", I found that bug 1458308 migrated this pref out of the profile directory. There was a bug filed afterwards about the value of this pref getting reset if the install folder was renamed (bug 1506983). Could this apply to you?

Comment 2

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Were those the only preferences that you noticed getting cleared? Bug 1530660 was recently fixed, where we discovered that we weren't safely persisting preferences to the disk if shutdown occurred abnormally (power failure, OS crash, etc).

I'll also note that we haven't heard from the bug reporter in 20 days, so this will likely be an INCOMPLETE next time we triage this (next week).

Comment 3

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

Closing as incomplete since we haven't heard back from the reporter. Please re-open the bug when you respond to the needinfo request.