1602182 - Don't sync locked preferences

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Sync, defect, P3)

Description

[David Gene]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Set example.com as a homepage on my personal computer.
2. Log into Firefox on my school computer, where the homepage is permanently set to school.edu via the operating system settings that I can't manage. Stay logged in long enough for account sync to finish.

Actual results:

Opening my personal computer and opening a new Window, I was expecting to be taken to the homepage I had set (as it's configured in my settings) but instead I got sent to school.edu.

Expected results:

I'd like to be taken to example.com, since this restriction forces me not to log into Firefox on my school computer if I don't want my homepage to be overridden.

Comment 1

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

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

I'm guessing this is actually done by using lockPref() - and I guess there is a case to be made that no locked prefs should be synced. I'm not sure how possible that will end up being though.

For this specific case though, you can adjust the preference services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.startup.homepage from true to false, and that specific preference will not sync.

As a side-note, you should be careful syncing your data in this way - you'd want to ensure that no one else at your school could possibly access your profile, or other students might get access to your passwords, preferences and browsing history. Signing out of sync doesn't delete this data locally.