"refresh your profile" deletes all multi account containers.
Categories
(Firefox :: Migration, defect, P3)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: sarah, Unassigned)
Details
Steps to reproduce:
- Have multi-account containers set up with lots of different containers
- Firefox now offers a "want to refresh your profile" type thing. Hit "yes."
User expectation:
- Some kind of "clean-up" has happened
Unexpected behavior:
- All multi-account container setup is gone.
Discussed in slack with danny conlin, :jld and :tanvi
- It's noted that there's https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1549204 which covers this problem
- For now, can we change the way the "Refresh Firefox" works so that it doesn't touch the privacy.userContext.enabled pref?
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Comment 1•3 years ago
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The refresh dialogue aims to reset Firefox by removing extensions and customization (including preferences and about:config changes) - the goal here is to help users address issues that may be related to preferences/extensions that would have been changed in the past whilst retaining personal information given how hard it is to recall defaults.
In both of the ways that users can run containers, the "refresh Firefox" goal seems aligned with its impact on container data:
- If the user runs the container extension then Firefox removes the container extension and clear container specific prefs
- if the user runs containers in Firefox itself (this is the nightly specific case) then the feature remains and customized container preferences are cleared (similar to Cookie exceptions, custom themes or site permissions)
I think it's hard to give custom handling for the refresh feature given that the feature is about guaranteeing to users that their customizations will be reset. One thing I wonder about though is how users get to it and if prompting users to refresh happens in contexts where users won't risk doing it by mistake. I'm aware of the following:
1 Go to about:support (hamburger menu or URL entry)
2 Launching troubleshoot mode brings up a modal that gives access to the refresh feature
3 If you have not run Firefox for a long period of time we tell users to refresh Firefox. I somehow recall mentions of that but I never experiences it
Are you seeing that users reporting the issue encounter scenario 3? In that case I think we should reconsider the "refresh Firefox?" prompt - it may be that this is a dialogue that is not applicable anymore or that should require timer adjustments (we know that a significant share of our users run Firefox infrequently, we probably should not overprompt them when they decide to run Firefox if not necessary)
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Updated•3 years ago
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Comment 2•3 years ago
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This is because MAC is an extension and all the data it saves is extension data, that gets cleaned up when it's deleted just like any other extension. An explicit goal of "Refresh" is to dump people's extensions because those are many times the source of the problems people are experiencing. MAC is doing the best it can with limited privileges of an extension. I believe this data is Sync'd, for users who have Sync enabled and enabled it for addon data; that can help.
The "fix" for this bug is to incorporate MAC into Firefox itself. We'd have to migrate the settings out of extension storage and into browser storage.
A half-way fix might be to push the extension storage into the browser and expose it to the MAC addon, perhaps through an "experimental API". Some container info is already exposed to other addons (Tree-Style Tabs knows what color to use, for example) so maybe that's not entirely far-fetched. But really, this just needs to be a built-in power-user feature that anyone can use without having to fiddle with add-ons.
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Comment 3•3 years ago
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The severity field is not set for this bug.
:dveditz, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.
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Comment 4•2 years ago
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This needs to be a product decision about how well we want to support this case, even though we've built so many of our own features and addons on top of containers. This is not the only extension that suffers painful loss of data due to a Firefox Refresh, however, so maybe Refresh itself needs better warnings.
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Comment 5•2 years ago
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Start fresh to fix performance issues. This will remove your extensions and customizations. You won’t lose essential information like bookmarks and passwords.
It does mention that extensions are going to be removed. We could make it more explicit that this also includes extensions data.
However, it might not be obvious that container data will be removed because Multi-Account Containers (or any other addons using the ContextualIdentities API) is seen as only a frontend to a built-in feature. In this specific case, users probably think container data is considered an "essential information".
Description
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