Syncing of themes is a bit hit-and-miss, and different for builtin themes vs addon themes.
Categories
(Firefox :: Sync, defect, P3)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: mozilla-bugzilla, Unassigned)
References
(Blocks 1 open bug)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:82.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/82.0
Steps to reproduce:
I'm using Firefox with a synced profile on multiple machines. On one of them, I wanted to change the theme to a different one (e.g. the new Alpenglow). I have disabled all of those settings keys:
services.sync.prefs.sync.extensions.activeThemeID
services.sync.prefs.sync.lightweightThemes.selectedThemeID
services.sync.prefs.sync.lightweightThemes.usedThemes
Actual results:
Firefox syncs the changed theme to all other synced instances, changing the theme on every machine.
Expected results:
I'm pretty sure that it used to work to not sync theme changes between synced machines. I used that many Firefox versions ago. It seems like a regression has been introduced, syncing the themes despite about:config saying not to do so.
I've noticed that the using one of the pre-installed themes does not sync to other devices. However, using a theme from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/ does sync to other devices. I'm using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kde-plasma-breeze/ (due to bug#1461650), and this one is being synced to all machines.
Comment 2•4 years ago
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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:82.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/82.0
Hi,
I have managed to reproduce it on Release version 82.0.2, Beta 83.0b7 and latest Nightly 84.0a1 (2020-11-01) using Windows 10.
Further, I will move this over to a component so developers can take a look over it. If this is not the correct component please feel free to change it to an appropriate one.
Thanks for your input.
Comment 3•4 years ago
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Mark, IIUC from the meeting earlier today you thought this might be a duplicate of an existing bug, are you able to provide more context?
Comment 4•4 years ago
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Possibly related to Bug 1367048, which seems to be about a change to make themes sync as extensions rather than as prefs.
Comment 5•4 years ago
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Do you have the "Add-ons" datatype enabled for syncing? If you disable syncing of Add-ons, does it also stop syncing the theme between profiles?
Comment 6•4 years ago
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I was thinking of bug 1627033, but it's actually a dupe of bug 1367048 - the short and sad version is that not all themes are created equal - "light weight" themes are controlled by that pref, but themes implemented as addons are not.
(And I see Ryan beat me to this comment :)
Well, this is disappointing. Is there any way to identify which themes are lightweight (supposedly previously known as "Personas") and which are addons?
Judging from the initial announcement at https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/09/20/future-themes-here/, all new (as of 2018) themes available at the AMO "Theme" pages are supposed to be "lightweight":
If you follow this blog, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. We’ve talked about theme updates a few times before. We actually turned on the new theme submission flow for testing a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t remove the old one. We’ve now flipped the switch and AMO will only accept the new themes.
However, I just tested it and re-uploaded the mentioned KDE Plasma Breeze theme, and it does show the exact same behavior. This leads me to believe it's not a lightweight theme, and it's still possible to upload non-lightweight (full?) themes.
So at the very least, this is a documentation issue. I suggest making it unmistakably clear which themes are lightweight (and thus can be installed on a per-installation-base), and which are "full" (and thus are synced between all synced instances).
Okay, I think the current behavior is broken nevertheless, or I complete misunderstand something. I created a new theme using the theme wizard on addons.mozilla.org, as described in the blog post linked earlier:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kde-plasma-breeze-lightweight/
As far as I understand the scattered documentation (more like blog posts), this is supposed to create a lightweight theme. However, enabling it (Firefox shows "AMO wants to install an Add-On") triggers the described behavior: It it installed, activated, and synced to all other instances.
So, I think this is actually broken, or I completely fail to understand what "lightweight" themes are supposed to be. Then again, I tried really hard to understand it, so I actually think Firefox documentation is to blame for this and should be improved.
Comment 9•4 years ago
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I used incorrect terminology - I probably should have used "builtin" instead of "lightweight". When a theme from an addon is installed, the setting of the preference activeThemeID
is more of a side-effect - you will notice that when you enable a theme implemented in an addon, all other addons which implement themes are shown as disabled and only the current theme is enabled - this is what dictates the theme. For themes which ship with Firefox, then just the pref is necessary.
The syncing of addons doesn't differentiate between themes and addons - the enabled and disabled state of all addons are synced. If there was additional UI exposed so we could ask the user whether they actually want this done or not, but this isn't something we are likely to get to any time soon - but I'm fine with keeping the bug open.
Updated•3 years ago
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Comment 12•2 years ago
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The severity field for this bug is set to S4
. However, the following bug duplicate has higher severity:
- Bug 1726790: S3
:teshaq, could you consider increasing the severity of this bug to S3
?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.
Updated•2 years ago
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Description
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