1584884 - Misleading error message "The bookmarks and history system will not be functional"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1653806

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P5)

Description

[wolf+mozilla]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Made firefox profile directory owned by root:root with 755 permissions.

Actual results:

I've got error message:

The bookmarks and history system will not be functional because one of Firefox's files is in use by another application. Some security software can cause this problem.

Expected results:

I should have get better error message stating something that is actually correct, for example

Firefox's profile directory is not writeable, please fix.

or something like that.

Comment 1

[Sebastian Padilla]

Hi Wolf,

Thanks for submitting this bug to us.

Would you be so kind to give me some repro steps? For instance, how do you make a folder to be owned by root:root.

With this help from you I can verify this bug.

Thanks!

Sebastian

Comment 2

[wolf+mozilla]

Well in my case it was caused by copying profile directory between machines and
the mkdir ... was called from root user. For clean reproduction this script
seems to work:

#!/bin/sh
set -eux

profile="$(pwd)/profile.dir"

if [ -e "$profile" ]; then
        sudo rm -rf -- "$profile"
fi

/usr/bin/firefox --no-remote -CreateProfile "test$$ $profile"

# Firefox will start here, close it via Quit in the menu (or CTRL+Q)
/usr/bin/firefox --no-remote -Profile "$profile"

sudo chmod 0755 -- "$profile"
sudo chown root:root -- "$profile"

# You will see the misleading error message here
/usr/bin/firefox --no-remote -Profile "$profile"

Comment 3

[Sebastian Padilla]

Hi Wolf,

Thanks for the assistance! I was able to reproduce it on Firefox 69.0.1 (32-bit) and on Firefox Nightly 71.0a1 (32-bit - 2019/10/04) on Ubuntu 16.04.

I've added a product and a component so one of our devs can take a look at this.

Thanks!!

Sebastian

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Change the status for beta to have the same as nightly and release.
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

We could probably change the message to say "The bookmarks and history system will not be functional because some of the Firefox's profile files are not reachable. they may be unaccessible or blocked by another application, like a security software."

A patch would be welcome, the string is at
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/5e830ac8f56fe191cb58a264e01cdbf6b6e847bd/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/places/places.properties#56
the string entity must be changed to something like lockPrompt.text2