1662086 - Problem saving images and videos from social-media sites

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Privacy: Anti-Tracking, defect, P3)

Description

[Abhi]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:81.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/81.0

Steps to reproduce:

Saved an mage or downloaded a video from Facebook-Instagram or Twitter.

Actual results:

The image does not get saved right away. The dot-symbol for "stuck" appears on the download arrow on the top bar. When I press the round arrow to retry, it gets downloaded.

Any video that I download from these sites (using the download helper sites) do not get downloaded. A message box showing a message of "unknown error" appears as soon as I click "Save link as".

(IMPORTANT NOTE: This issue occurs only after I have synced Firrefox with my account. On a fresh download, this does not happen. However, it is not an issue with extensions. When I restart in safe mode with extensions disabled, the issue still persists.)

Expected results:

The images should get saved without any error and videos should get downloaded as has been happening without any problem till Firefox 80.

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

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

This issue occurs only after I have synced Firrefox with my account

Sometimes bugs like these are caused by a bad preference that is being synced between machines. You could try something like:

• On a Firefox that's connected to your Account, go into sync settings and disable syncing of the "Options" datatype. (This has the side-effect of deleting previously-synced options data from the sync server).
• Try creating a new Firefox profile, connecting and syncing with your Account, and see if you can still reproduce the issue.

If disabling the "options" datatype in sync fixes the issue, it's a good indicator that a bad synced option is the culprit, and we could then do more investigation about which particular option it might be.

Comment 3

[Abhi]

(In reply to Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly] from comment #2)

This issue occurs only after I have synced Firrefox with my account

Sometimes bugs like these are caused by a bad preference that is being synced between machines. You could try something like:

• On a Firefox that's connected to your Account, go into sync settings and disable syncing of the "Options" datatype. (This has the side-effect of deleting previously-synced options data from the sync server).
• Try creating a new Firefox profile, connecting and syncing with your Account, and see if you can still reproduce the issue.

If disabling the "options" datatype in sync fixes the issue, it's a good indicator that a bad synced option is the culprit, and we could then do more investigation about which particular option it might be.

Thanks for your response and advice. Your suggestion worked! It turns out that the problem saving images and videos from social-media sites occurs WHEN ENHANCED TRACKING PROTECTION IS SET TO STRICT. When it is set to standard, everything is OK.

However, till Firefox 80 even with strict protection, the problem does not occur. It happens in Firefox 81b and 82a.

Comment 4

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

Great! I'm moving this bug to the anti-tracking component where hopefully someone knowledgeable in that area can comment further.

Comment 5

[Priddybroderickson5]

Thank you for providing detailed information about the issue you're facing with downloading images and videos from social media platforms. It seems like there might be a synchronization-related concern, given that the problem arises after syncing with your Firefox account. It's wise that you've ruled out extensions as the cause. To resolve this, consider checking for Deutsche Sterne updates or troubleshooting steps provided by Firefox's support. This will help ensure smooth downloading experiences as before.