1903473 - "about:about" contains "about:config" and "about:addons" but they don't work

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(GeckoView :: General, defect, P3)

Comment 1

[Artemka]

There is a bug in Firefox and Firefox Focus for Android

Comment 2

[[:owlish] 🦉 PST]

Hi Artemka, thank you for filing the bug! Those pages are not supposed to work in our release browsers, they are only exposed in Nightly. Are you experiencing this in Nightly or release Firefox?

Comment 3

[Artemka]

The problem is different, why are they then displayed in the release versions?

Comment 4

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

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

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 5

[Tom S. (please needinfo tschuster)]

You probably want to use nsIAboutModule::HIDE_FROM_ABOUTABOUT when defining the the "config" module in non-Nightly Fenix: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/956f21594f3178f75c3a1c278980e112a65eb19d/docshell/base/nsAboutRedirector.cpp#101-102

Comment 6

[Polly [:polly]]

hi owlish! would you be ok to add a bit more info on how to fix this please?
I think for a first bug, it could use a bit more explanation at the level of which lines to add to which files!

Comment 7

[Thinker Li [:sinker]]

Hi Owlish, right now, in spite of they are showing on the about:about page, the about:addons page is not available on fenix. On the other side, about:config is always available even about:about doesn't show it. To fix this bug properly, about:addons should be removed from about:about of fenix no matter nightly or no, or get the page back for fenix nightly. For about:config, I think it should be removed from about:about, but users should be able to access it by typing the URL manually.
WDYT?!!

Comment 8

[Thinker Li [:sinker]]

Attachment: Bug 1903473 - Remove about:addons and about:config from about:about. r?#android-reviewers

With fenix, "about:config" and "about:about" are supposed to be
disable on non-nightly builds. Here, we remove "abouc:config" from the
"about:about" page for non-nightly builds. "about:addons" has been
disabled completely for fenix, no mater it is nightly or not.

Even "about:config" has been removed from the "about:about" page, but
users still can access it by typing it's URL manually.

Comment 9

[Thinker Li [:sinker]]

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=c1d6ad3abe9f587f8bbc310b0fe9df95af179b58

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/c20953c57262
Remove about:addons and about:config from about:about. r=geckoview-reviewers,owlish

Comment 11

[amarc]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c20953c57262

Comment 12

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

(In reply to Thinker Li [:sinker] from comment #7)

[...] For about:config, I think it should be removed from about:about, but users should be able to access it by typing the URL manually.

FWIW that isn't exactly what I observed today. about:config is indeed supposed to be available to users of Fenix Beta and Nightly (and debug). It looks like this patch changed that, which is surprising. I think we should restore this functionality, and not let users rely on the "chrome://" workaround.

Also, AFAICT about:addons is opening the fenix add-ons manager, and that is probably handled at the app level since the patch for this bug didn't change this behavior in current Fenix Beta. So that part looks alright.

Comment 13

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

Attachment: Bug 1903473 - Make sure about:config is registered on Android. r?Gijs!

In D240984, an attempt was made to re-enable about:config on Android
because it was removed by mistake. That was done by reverting some
changes from D232785.

The intent was to keep about:config hidden in about:about on Android
but allow it to work unconditionally because GeckoView has a runtime
setting to control the presence/absence of this special page. I thought
not updating components.conf was precisely about that but that didn't
work in the end...

It is now clear to me that we should keep 'config' in components.conf
and use a flag to hide the page in about:about. That's because this
config file is used at build time, therefore we always want about:config
available on Android, and it's up to the embedder to enable/disable it
with the runtime setting (that controls the general.aboutConfig.enable
pref under the hood).

Comment 14

[Phabricator Automation]

Comment on attachment 9473201 [details]
Bug 1903473 - Make sure about:config is registered on Android. r?Gijs!

Revision D242270 was moved to bug 1949695. Setting attachment 9473201 [details] to obsolete.

Comment 15

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

(oops I attached a patch to the wrong bug, sorry)