1816928 - Extension install sync easy to break

Status: NEW

(WebExtensions :: General, defect, P2)

Description

[chriskrause]

Steps to reproduce:

Extension install syncing seems easy to break, if you uninstall and extension and reinstall it, it often will uninstall from other synced clients, but never reinstall. You can then uninstall it again and reinstall it on either of those machines and it will never seem to sync install to the other.

You should be able to reproduce this by keeping 2 synced browsers open on different machines, and uninstall/reinstall the extension a few times on one of them. That extensions install status will no longer be enforced on those clients until you reinstall/clear the browsers settings and start a fresh account login/resync.

Actual results:

Extension just simply uninstalls from the other synced machines but never reinstall as if a hidden flag is being set on that extension to keep it synced.

Encountered this many times testing Firefox Translate, that often would break and require an uninstall/reinstall.

Expected results:

Expected result is installed extensions would be actively checked against the servers list of extensions on your account during sync and enforced (unless this behavior is intended as a means of letting you keep extension sync enabled but allow specific extensions to be kept on only some installs?)

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'WebExtensions::Untriaged' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Alex Cornestean]

Hello,

I managed to reproduced the issue using an account synced on 2 browsers (latest Release and Nightly) on the same machine.

On Release, I initially installed 2 extensions and then created a Firefox account which I used to log in on Nightly.
Immediately after logging in on Nightly, the installed extensions from Release were synced/installed on Nightly.
I then proceeded with removing and almost immediately reinstalling one extension on Release and then waiting for the sync to occur on Nightly. The result was that the extension got removed from Nightly but never re-installed back – so all I observed matches what is described in Comment 0.

Comment 4

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

Unfortunately there are quite a number of open bugs related to addons that we haven't prioritized yet. Eg, bug 1498974 (which is more about the "enabled" state when actually being installed), bug 1795847 which is about transient network errors breaking things, bug 1271186 (quite regular "Add-on not found after install" errors after sync tries to install it), bug 1285866 (some interactions between sync and the addon manager appear problematic)

If you attach logs from about:sync-log I can probably help determine which of these issues you are actually hitting. My money would be on bug 1271186 as that's the most common one I see in the wild. In that bug in particular, sync asks the addon manager to install the addon, which appears to succeed, but then trying to get a reference to the addon fails. It's not trivially reproducible, and it's difficult to find any logs or diagnostics from the addon manager when it does. We probably need a cross-team effort to improve and modernize addon syncing.

Bug 1234400 is the closest we have to a meta for these issues, so I'll link that.