1684773 - Conflict between 'Refresh Firefox' and 'Firefox Sync': Confusing and scary that add-ons get reinstalled approx one day after refreshing Firefox profile

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Will Levine]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:86.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/86.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Use the same firefox profile for many, many years. Install several addons. Eventually you decide you want a fresh start.
2. Click 'Refresh Nightly' from about:support. This warns me that I will lose all my add-ons, which is what I desire.
3. Complete the refresh process.
4. As expected, all my addons are gone, as verified by checking about:addons.
5. My plan was to gradually re-install my add-ons one by one to be able to isolate if any of them were causing problems.

Actual results:

Fast-forward one day. I used the computer in the morning, still no addons. I take a break to eat lunch. When I get back, all my addons are reinstalled: LastPass addon is prompting for a password, another addon has opened a new tab advertising itself, and I can see 8 installed addons in about:addons (previously there were zero).

This was extremely confusing and I had no idea what was going on. Eventually I figured out that that they were probably reinstalled by Firefox Sync, which had a checkbox enabled to sync Add-Ons. (I don't believe I have ever enabled this explicitly. I only intended to use Sync for Bookmarks, History. and Open Tabs.)

Expected results:

Either the add-ons should not be reinstalled, or there should be some warning that this will happen, or at the very least, some explanation when it actually happens.

The Refresh Firefox process is very clear that it will remove all addons, so it is very confusing that Firefox later undoes this. Especially confusing is the time delay of one day.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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

Comment 2

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

It's odd that it took a day, but yes, this is the expected behaviour. Because syncing is enabled "per account" rather than "per device" there's really no alternative - eg, having those addons vanish from other Firefoxes connected to your account would be extremely surprising too, and having subsets of things on devices isn't something sync supports (that's bug 1215415)

I think the correct solution is to have the refresh process include special text for sync users, indicating that anything currently synced may re-appear, and offering to take them to about:preferences#sync so they could disable addon syncing, for example - so I'm moving the bug to (what I hope is) the component for refresh.

Comment 3

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

This is a front-end issue really.

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:mossop, could you have a look please?

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