Open Bug 1879785 Opened 2 years ago Updated 6 months ago

Firefox should not sync autoscroll between systems

Categories

(Firefox :: Sync, defect, P2)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Sync
Version:
Firefox 122
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
UNCONFIRMED
Project Flags:
Accessibility Severity s4

People

(Reporter: erwinm, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Keywords: access, Whiteboard: [fxsync-])

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:122.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/122.0

Steps to reproduce:

In the past, I've thought Firefox should sync more accessibility settings. But I'm beginning to think it shouldn't sync this one, and maybe it shouldn't sync others.

  1. Disable Autoscroll on MacOS.

  2. Enable Autoscroll on Linux.

  3. Open Firefox on MacOS.

Actual results:

  1. Now Autoscroll is enabled on MacOS.

I have other scrolling software on MacOS, Autoscroll interferes with this, and the combination can lead to sudden unexpected smooth/painful scrolling and motion sickness.

I can't find comparable scrolling software on Linux, Autoscroll is the best I can find there.

Expected results:

Autoscroll should not sync between operating systems.

Apparently this bug has been fixed in the past, e.g. bug 636176, but it's broken again.

Component: Untriaged → Disability Access

Thank you for reporting the behavior, MarjaE!

Moving this to the Settings UI component (with a11y triage details added for the affects on the accessibility). It looks like the pref is "services.sync.prefs.sync.general.autoScroll" that was added by the bug 1661934 (under #8 in the description)

Accessibility Severity: --- → s4
Component: Disability Access → Settings UI
Depends on: 636176
Keywords: access
Component: Settings UI → Sync
See Also: → 1661934

There is a bit of history here - that pref gets special treatment because it has a separate default on Linux then elsewhere - see https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/da49863c3d6f34038d00f5ba701b9a2ad9cbadba/browser/app/profile/firefox.js#1581 and bug 1847237. Once you toggle this pref on a synced system, that new toggled value will sync everywhere.

Note that you can disable this preference by setting the pref services.sync.prefs.sync.general.autoScroll to false. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sync-custom-preferences also has instructions for customizing which prefs are synced, but I'm not aware of any bugs tracking a GUI for that and I'm not sure there would be any progress even if such a bug existed.

#c3

markh@mozilla.com, thank you for that information. I've filed id=1881610, because I believe that it solves a significant amount of problems I see filed here which can't easily be solved except by user preference, and I don't believe that about:config is the solution to them, despite using it myself.

However, in lieu of that, I continue to disagree with this proposal.

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

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Flags: needinfo?(teshaq)

Regarding this specific pref syncing, we can switch the default to not sync to avoid handling all edge cases. And like it was already pointed out in the above comments, having a better story overall for managing which preferences sync and which do not is desirable, but unlikely to progress without prioritization (and that's unlikely to happen anytime soon)

Severity: -- → S3
Flags: needinfo?(teshaq)
Priority: -- → P2

Given bug 1986297, it seems like #c6 is the right way to move forward on this specific issue.

Whiteboard: [fxsync-]
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