1944183 - Firefox Android accesses device location data when trying to print a web page

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(GeckoView :: General, defect)

Description

[Saren Tasciyan]

Attachment: Screenshot_20250128-010249_Print Spooler.png

Firefox for Android

Steps to reproduce:

I pressed the 3 dots to open the menu.
Then I pressed on the "Print" menu item.

Actual results:

Print view is displayed with "Save as PDF" option preselected. At this stage my notification bar displays that the location data is being accessed (on Lineage OS there is a green location icon appearing).

Expected results:

Everything was ok, except for the location data being accessed for printing.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

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

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

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 3

[Olivia Hall [:olivia]]

Thank you for reporting, Saren!

A couple of questions:

• Does this only happen on Lineage OS?
• Does this happen every time you print?
  • We need to eliminate that another background service wasn't accessing location simultaneously as printing, if this only happened once.

Comment 4

[Saren Tasciyan]

I now had to chance to try on Motorola some Google phone, and it doesn't happen there.
It happens every time on my Lineage OS.

Comment 5

[[:owlish] 🦉 PST]

It would be great to verify if this reproduces on other flavours of Android

Comment 6

[Vasilica Tamas QA [:vtamas]]

Attachment: SamsungS24Android14.JPEG

I wasn't able to reproduce this issue on Firefox Nightly 138 (2025-03-07), Firefox 137 beta 2 and Firefox 136 on Google Pixel 8 (Android 15), Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (Android 14), Lenovo Tab P11 (Android 13), Xiaomi 12T (Android 12), Nothing Phone 1 (Android 12), Oppo Find X3 Neo (Android 11). I confirm that the location is not requested on Print Preview.
Unfortunately, we don't have a device with Lineage OS to verify the behavior there as well.

Please let me know if any additional testing is required from the QA side.

Comment 7

[Saren Tasciyan]

Here are screenshots from my side and please let me know if I can do anything to investigate this further. I find this peculiar. If there are any components, which are used by the app from the operating system, I can bring this up on the LineageOS side? FYI: the location access disappears after short while (green icon on top).

Comment 8

[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 9

[Olivia Hall [:olivia]]

If there are any components, which are used by the app from the operating system, I can bring this up on the LineageOS side?

Yeah, I agree this is peculiar. Asking LineageOS about it would be a good next step because the print screen is OS provided. Essentially, a request to print launches an OS provided com.android.printspooler.ui.PrintActivity. (Example Google Android one.)

GV/Fenix/Focus are using an implementation called GeckoViewPrintDocumentAdapter. This is an extension of the system defined PrintDocumentAdapter. This is how the OS PrintActivity is launched and interacted with.