1621683 - “Checking for updates” spins forever in marionette mode

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Remote Protocol :: Marionette, defect)

Description

[SquareGearsLogic]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

Steps to reproduce:

• Install FF Developer Edition 75.0b2 (64-bit) for Windows from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
• run it and open "about" window dialog: it says FF is up to date.
• enable "marionette mode" (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/testing/marionette/index.html) one of two ways:

1. close FF and add "--marionette" command line argument
   0r
2. go to "about:config" and set "marionette.enabled" true and restart FF.

Actual results:

With marionette mode enabled "About dialog" will show “Checking for updates” that never goes away.

if you disable marionette mode by setting "marionette.enabled" to false, issue goes away. So this is a stable bug.

Not sure if I understood correctly what happened, but I also noted that updates actually coming-in automatically at some point but they break FF startup - I see two dependent FF processes in process explorer, but UI window doesn't appear.
In this case the only way to bring FF UI back from user perspective is to reinstall FF or vanish user settings that is not nice...

Expected results:

If marionette tries to preserve current version of FF during automations, it should say so instead of spinning "Checking for updates" icon.

Comment 1

[Timea Cernea [:tbabos][inactive]]

Reproduced on all the latest Firefox versions on Windows 10 x64.
Moving it over to Marionette so developers can check it out. Thanks for the report!

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

During any kind of automated testing we cannot allow updates. As such update checks are disabled similar to all the other test harnesses. Note that none of those are allowed to do any modification in the UI of Firefox. The spinning icon is what the about dialog uses. For details you want to check the updater logs in the console once enabled.

Feel free to set a custom value for app.update.disabledForTesting which defaults to true with Marionette enabled.