1804855 - The autoplay permission for about:welcome does not save the user choice

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Site Permissions, defect, P3)

Description

[Alin Ilea, Desktop Test Engineering]

Attachment: 2022-12-09_11h12_52.mp4

Found in

• 109.0a1 (2022-12-09)

Affected versions

• 109.0a1

Tested platforms

• Affected platforms: Windows 10, macOS 12, Ubuntu 20.

Steps to reproduce

1. Launch Firefox with new profile.
2. Open about:preferences#privacy > Permissions
3. Click on Autoplay Settings
4. Change the about:welcome status value and click Save Changes.
5. Click on Autoplay Settings.

Expected result

• The about:welcome changed value is saved.

Actual result

• The about:welcome changed value is not saved.

Regression range
Not a regression. This is happening since bug 1799997 landed (new implementation).

Additional notes

• I'm not sure if the second row from Autoplay Settings is expected, the about:welcome^privateBrowsingld=1 is displayed. Just let me know if I should file a new issue for it.

Comment 1

[Shane Hughes [:aminomancer]]

Ideally, our about page permissions shouldn't display in this menu - using site permissions for about:welcome is really just an implementation detail. The permission is added here. I think whether we respect the user value or not, it would be best to exclude it from this menu, as the actual address about:welcome is never exposed to the user directly (it's hidden from the urlbar for example) except in about:about, and this page is not supposed to appear more than once per profile. It's not saved in history either. So seeing it in permissions is probably just confusing for most users.

Comment 2

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

We could perhaps extend this check https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/43cb6eca1c3069d46d589d52ab4949257e630d19/browser/components/preferences/dialogs/permissions.js#248-255 to cover default permissions too. Showing default permissions to users makes sense so they can be overwritten. PBM permissions can be hidden though since changes there are temporary anyway.
It's still odd that overwriting these permissions doesn't seem to work.