1728530 - [macOS] Running Firefox in the .dmg while profile manager is not set to launch by default will not prompt the user to install Firefox

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect, P1)

Description

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Affected versions

• Firefox 93.0a1

Affected platforms

• macOS 10.15.7

Preconditions

• Have the profile manager set to not start with a profile by default

Steps to reproduce

1. Open the .dmg
2. Double click the "Firefox Nightly" icon in the .dmg folder

Expected result

• A prompt with Finish installing Nightly? message is shown

Actual result

• Finish installing Nightly is not shown

Regression range

• No regression, first implementation of mac first run experience

Comment 1

[Stephen A Pohl [:spohl]]

I can confirm. Looking into it.

Comment 2

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

The check is only triggered if this launch of Firefox caused a new profile to be created. This only happens if the profile manager is not set to show by default. It also only happens if there is not yet an existing profile for the path from which Firefox is launched.
During testing, this means that you frequently need to edit profiles.ini to remove the existing profile that was created during the previous test.

This feature is intended for novice users. Most of them will not have interacted with the profile manager before and will have all settings at the defaults.

One note: "the path from which Firefox is launched" here refers to the "translocated" path. You may see some inconsistent behavior due to this. "App Translocation" is a security feature in macOS 10.12+ which moves app bundles that are launched from quarantined dmgs to a temporary path like /private/var/folders/96/nv6fx_mx75jg7tm4rwmlzfnh0000gn/T/AppTranslocation/D660235B-EBE2-448E-A9F2-773FFE4DCE11/d/Firefox Nightly.app .
This path may stay the same during subsequent launches from the same dmg (causing the same "automatically created" profile to be used), or it may change. For example, it'll usually change if the dmg is ejected and re-mounted. We've also seen it change without dmg ejection if the screen saver was running between subsequent launches.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

To add to the above, this isn't really a bug. The way I was testing was to temporarily move the entire /Users/jwatt/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles folder somewhere safe, then between each run of Firefox I was deleting the new Profiles folder that was created whenever Firefox launched. That simulates the new user behavior that we're interested in.

csasca: does the above work for QA?
spohl: assuming QA is happy with the above, I suggest closing this as WONTFIX.

Comment 4

[Catalin Sasca, Desktop Test Engineering [:csasca]]

Oh, we are ok with this, we tested by setting the profile manager to default as it was faster than moving/deleting profiles.

Comment 5

[Stephen A Pohl [:spohl]]

Thanks, :jwatt and :csasca!