306661 - search plugins completely disapeared in deerpark

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Al Redz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050712 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050712 Firefox/1.0+

The plugins in Deer park completly disapeared after shutting down and closing
out deerpark with only a few extensions installed. I've reinstalled deerpark
still plugins are gone. 

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Installed a few compatible extensions. adblock, noscript, tabmix plus,
dictionary search,rip.
2. open up about:config and change <code>browser.search.defaulturl</code> to
<code>http://www.google.com/search?q=</code> 
3. Now exited and restarted with sanitize and plugins gone missing.

Actual Results:  
plugins are gone.

Expected Results:  
The plugins should be there

Comment 1

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

My dad's had this happen to him as well -- no idea what caused it.  He's unable
to add new search plugins; it just always remains an empty menu with the "Add
Engines" menu item.

Comment 2

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

localstore.rdf seems to be overwritten with nulls, and we don't recover from
this -- the search plugin issue is caused by us failing when we try to read it.
 This is also causing rafael's issue of having his toolbars revert to the default.

If localstore.rdf is corrupted, we never try to save it -- because we "save" it
by just interacting with it through the RDF xml datasource, which won't try to
save if it can't read.

I have no idea how this file gets corrupted; it's full of nulls with both my
dad's and Rafael's profile.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Is it appropriately sized as if it were a real localstore.rdf, but it's
all-nulls? Was this seen on windows only?

Comment 4

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Is it appropriately sized as if it were a real localstore.rdf, but it's
> all-nulls? Was this seen on windows only?

Windows-only, and yeah; it was a few kb in size, all nulls.

Comment 5

[O. Atsushi (Torisugari)]

localstore.rdf is a kitchensink, so I'm afraid it's not easy to specify
what was caused that null problem unless we have reproducible steps.

As for InternetSearch, I wonder whether it's worth moving info from
localstore to search.rdf, which is another datasource in the profile.
It's just a workaround, but it would reduce the heavy access to
localstore.rdf and maybe prevent a potential corruption. At least,
it should a little help investigating the null issue...



dataloss?

Comment 6

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

We don't even have a handle on this yet so I don't think we're going to see this
make 1.5. If QA can narrow this down in the next couple of days and there's a
simple and low-risk fix, please nominate the patch.

Comment 7

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

I don't think we can narrow it down or come up with a fix, but we can come up
with a bandaid that will prevent people from getting stuck in this broken state
(and we understand what that state is -- a corrupted localstore.rdf).  Once you
get in this state, there is *no way* to recover your profile, without knowing
that you either have to go into safe mode and "reset toolbars" or deleting
localstore.rdf from the magic profile folder.

Comment 8

[Lucius Chiaraviglio]

In Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, I had a possibly related problem:  I tried to add
Wikipedia using the normal Mozilla page for adding search engines; the
"Wikipedia&Google" entry appeared UNDER the "Add Engines..." command, and then
disappeared shortly thereafter.  Attempting to add it again failed, but then
when I quit Firefox and restarted it, the "Wikipedia&Google" entry appeared at
the end of the normal list of search engines, and so far seems to be staying
there.

One other thing that might help with diagnosis:  when the "Wikipedia&Google"
entry temporarily disappeared, an extra border appeared in the search engine
menu, under "Add engines..."

I don't know enough of the innards of Firefox to know whether this is a related
problem that DIDN'T corrupt localstore.rdf (I just checked -- can't say whether
mine is fully valid, but at least it is not overwritten with nulls), or
something else altogether.

Comment 9

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> In Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, I had a possibly related problem:  I tried to add
> Wikipedia using the normal Mozilla page for adding search engines; the
> "Wikipedia&Google" entry appeared UNDER the "Add Engines..." command, and then
> disappeared shortly thereafter.  Attempting to add it again failed, but then
> when I quit Firefox and restarted it, the "Wikipedia&Google" entry appeared at
> the end of the normal list of search engines, and so far seems to be staying
> there.
> 
> One other thing that might help with diagnosis:  when the "Wikipedia&Google"
> entry temporarily disappeared, an extra border appeared in the search engine
> menu, under "Add engines..."

I've seen this happen as well; usually it's caused by clicking the search menu
too quickly after adding a new engine (there's a race condition somewhere). 
When it happens, the search plugins menu is usually screwed, and requires a new
window to be created (or a restart).  But it shouldn't corrupt the localstore.rdf.

Comment 10

[Martin Lemburg]

I have this behavior in firefox, since 1.5RC2 too!

I tried to see, what happens, if the search plugins were existing not only in my profile, but in the main searchplugin directory, but nothing changed!

Comment 11

[kitchin]

Reported in Linux and Mac OS X also.
See Bug 318306, Comment 4.

Comment 12

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The new search service doesn't rely on localstore.rdf, and there's no evidence that these types of problems are occuring with the new search service (any cases of this behavior in the new search service would probably be separate bugs anyways).