272013 - about:config prefs not saved when FFox closed by logout, or shutdown

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Rob North]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

See summary.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open the about:config page
2. Edit a preference
    -- I have tried the following preferences: browser.underline_anchors and 
       image.animation_mode.
3. Log out of your windows session, either to login as different user, or reboot
machine.

Actual Results:  
Modified prefs not saved.

Expected Results:  
Modified prefs should be saved.

Have tried on blank profiles, and on firefox trunk build 2004111907, with
same results.
Linux version is Suse 8.2.
Window manager is KDE.

Doesn't occur when:
     *Changing preferences via the Edit->Preferences dialog.
     *Quitting firefox by closing window, or selecting Quit from Firefox
      menu.

    At minimum, please put a quick note about this in the release notes, for 
    next version.

Comment 1

[luddite]

I have experienced this problem when trying to add data like this to that file:

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "allowclipboard");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.sites", "http://www.mozilla.org");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy", "allAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste", "allAccess");

It does not save.

Comment 2

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

This is very similar to bug 212251, do you experience that one too?

The Preferences dialog has the code to flush the changes to the disk on close.

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

This bug is quite simple, we don't continuously save preferences, and we don't shut down properly when Linux shuts down (we just get caught in the killall hammer of doom) so we never write the prefs out.  Not too much we can do about that other than spot-fix to work with specific shutdown mechanisms, or hope that launchd gets better adoption, iirc.

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs,
filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does this still reproduce?

Comment 6

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

I've never had this problem with any of my profiles on any platform so I don't know.

Comment 7

[Matthias :Kammueller]

Tried to repoduce it with Windows 10 and Firefox Developer Edition.
Could not repoduce it neither with shutdown nor logout.
I think this can be marked as fixed?

[Stumbled across this since I am part of a about:config-redesign, Bug 1493439)]