1910070 - Crash signatures are restored from the backup file

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Profile Backup, defect)

Description

[Ciprian Georgiu, Desktop QA]

Found in

• latest Nightly 130.0a1

Affected versions

• latest Nightly 130.0a1

Tested platforms

• Affected platforms: Windows 11, Ubuntu 22.04 and macOS 14

Preconditions

• browser.backup.preferences.ui.enabled = true
• browser.backup.scheduled.idle-threshold-seconds = 5
• browser.backup.scheduled.enabled = true

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to the backup section from "about:preferences" page.
2. Enable backup by clicking on the "Manage backup" -> "Turn on backup".
3. Crash Firefox via about:crashparent.
4. Wait for the backup file to be created.
5. Click on the "Restore..." buton from the "Restore your data" section.
6. Restore the backup file.

Expected result

• The backup file does not contain crash reports in about:crashes page.

Actual result

• The backup file contains crash reports in about:crashes page.

Regression range

• Not a regression.

Comment 1

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Thanks for filing this!

So this is actually fairly interesting - what's going on here is that when Firefox creates a crash report, it puts that report in a folder on the filesystem outside of the profile directory. That folder is shared by all profiles using that same version of Firefox, meaning that if you have two separate profiles A and B, and you create a crash report in A, you'll see that crash report listed in about:crashes in B.

I don't exactly know why it was built that way, but that's how it works. The backups themselves, however, do not contain the crash reports. You can confirm this by modifying the steps from comment 0 so that the backup is transferred and restored on a different device - in that case, you should not find the crash report listed after step 6.

So I think we're working as intended here, I'm going to close this one out as INVALID.