1730251 - New profile default-release-n created every time Firefox starts after sleep/restart (macOS), because com.apple.quarantine extended attribute causes running in translocation mode

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Ryan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:92.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/92.0

Steps to reproduce:

First I completely uninstalled Firefox to see if that would fix it (made sure all related files were deleted too), then installed the latest version (92.0). When I opened Firefox after installing, a new default profile is created and the browser starts normally.

After quitting and reopening Firefox, it uses the same profile as expected, however, if I quit Firefox and put the computer to sleep, logout, or restart and then open Firefox, a new profile is created with the name default-release-n where n = 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. and appears in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/. Then I have to go to about:profiles and change the default profile back to the original (it's still recognized and in the list). Whenever I restart my computer I have to repeat this process. The default profile is saved up until I restart (or sleep).

Actual results:

The default Firefox profile isn't saved and a new one is created.

Expected results:

Firefox should remember the default profile.

Comment 1

[Ryan]

Attachment: Firefox creates multiple profiles

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Toolkit::Startup and Profile System' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 3

[Ryan]

I think I should mention that this started happening after updating from FF 91 to 92.

Comment 4

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

If you go to about:support what is the value of "Application Binary", and does it change after you restart macOS?

Comment 5

[Ryan]

First it's
/private/var/folders/b6/w7j72xpx1rx_kkfb6pqc1sm40000gn/T/AppTranslocation/035042F8-318F-400B-8181-97E3D0C4CDE2/d/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox
and after restarting it changes to
/private/var/folders/b6/w7j72xpx1rx_kkfb6pqc1sm40000gn/T/AppTranslocation/317B94EA-65DB-4085-9662-5AD48BAA8F72/d/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox

It looks like the UUID in the path changes every time, but I'm not sure what that means. I checked and it also happens after sleeping.

Comment 6

[Ryan]

After digging around it looks like my /Applications/Firefox.app had the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute which caused it to run in "translocation" mode? I'm not really sure what that means but running xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Firefox.app seems to have fixed it.. Not sure how that happened.

Comment 7

[Ryan]

Thank you so much for helping me!! That was driving me crazy.. I guess it was a problem with my machine and not Firefox (still not sure how the com.apple.quarantine attribute was set). I would close the issue but I'm not sure how..

Comment 8

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Ok that confirms my suspicion! How did you install the latest version of Firefox? I know some older file management tools can cause that to happen but just dragging in Finder shouldn't cause it.

Comment 9

[Ryan]

I'm pretty sure I just downloaded the latest version from the Firefox website (using the Firefox browser) and dragged it to my Applications folder.

What originally happened (that I just now remembered) was that my v91 Firefox was trying to update to v92 and it would ask "restart to update" or something similar, so I'd click "restart Firefox" however it wouldn't install the update. I tried a few more times but it didn't work, so I just downloaded the latest version from the Firefox website and replaced the app with the new one. After discovering the issue I tried removing the app and all related files (~/Library/{Application Support,Caches,Saved Application State,Preferences}/Firefox) and reinstalled but the issue persisted.

Although I just tried it again and couldn't replicate the issue. While the com.apple.quarantine attribute was still set on Firefox.app, it didn't run in "translation" mode. I guess it was just a one-off issue with my computer.

Comment 10

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

I don't know if you have any ideas what could have happened here Markus?

Comment 11

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

No idea, but I'd love to know! I don't have a good sense of when the quarantine attribute is removed under normal circumstances.

Comment 12

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

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

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 13

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Is there any possibility you got Firefox deployed by JAMF or some other deployment software or is this only your personal machine?

Comment 14

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

So to give more detail on why I asked that, we had a similar problem come up with enterprise installs. You can see one case here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1350683

Since we now have code that detects when Firefox is launched from a disk image, I'm wondering if we should add something similar for this case and if we see "AppTranslocation" in the application path, display a message the Firefox is quarantined.

This appears to be something that other applications have done.

Comment 15

[Ryan]

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #13)

Is there any possibility you got Firefox deployed by JAMF or some other deployment software or is this only your personal machine?

It was on my personal machine and I downloaded Firefox from mozilla.org. I tried to reproduce it using the latest version (94) but couldn't and I'm still not really sure what caused it.