1653806 - Improve the “The bookmarks and history system will not be functional because one of Firefox's files is in use by another application.” message

Status: NEW

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

Description

[21Naown]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Set the size of “favicons.sqlite” to 0 or 1 byte;
2. Execute Firefox displays “The bookmarks and history system will not be functional because one of Firefox's files is in use by another application.”.

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

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

You are corrupting the database, the system is not functional. Surely the message could be improved but I don't see this as a huge problem

Comment 3

[21Naown]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #2)

You are corrupting the database, the system is not functional. Surely the message could be improved but I don't see this as a huge problem

If the size is set to 2 bytes for example, the file seems reinitialized. It is not the case for 0 and 1 byte.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

it doesn't really matter, the database must be sane (openable by Sqlite)

Comment 5

[21Naown]

The database is not sane after “truncate --size 2 favicons.sqlite”, but Firefox reinitializes it. Firefox does not reinitialize the database if the size is set to 0 or 1 byte.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This is an error notification bar we show to users on startup if the history/bookmarks system cannot be initialized
The current text reads:
"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."
This is misleading because it can also happen if the files are corrupt rather than being in-use. I'd suggest to change the text to:
"The bookmarks and history system is not functional because some of Firefox's profile files may be corrupt, or locked by a third party security application."
The notification bar then provides a button pointing to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-bookmarks-and-history-will-not-be-functional

Meridel, wdyt?

Comment 9

[Meridel [:meridel]]

Marco, can you confirm the context in which this is displayed, and share a screenshot of the current notification?

Comment 10

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Attachment: Screenshot

This is a screenshot of the notification.
This is shown when we detect unfixable corruption to the bookmarks and history database, and we have no way to initialize it. Usually that has 2 main causes:

1. the database is corrupt in some special way that doesn't allow us to detect/fix it easily
2. the database is kept locked by some third party application

Comment 11

[Meridel [:meridel]]

Thanks, Marco! Romain, can you advise if changes to strings here are in scope and, if so, when?

Comment 12

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

If adjusting the string could better help users understand the source of the issue I agree that we should.
Priority-wise I'd make this a low priority given how rarely we see it.

Comment 13

[Tethys]

You may only see it rarely. I see it quite a lot, because Firefox's locking on NFS is so abysmal.

Comment 14

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Tethys from comment #13)

You may only see it rarely. I see it quite a lot, because Firefox's locking on NFS is so abysmal.

Actually, the problem is NFS lies to Sqlite, we can't do much if the filesystem is lying about data being synced to disk, we did all we could so far.