316368 - Firefox tries to write into installation directory

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 311480

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Marc Schütz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051107 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051107 Firefox/1.5

Firefox tries to write into its installation directory (here: /opt/firefox), which is only writable by root. Here is some output of installwatch:

9       open    /opt/firefox/update.test        #success
0       unlink  /opt/firefox/update.test        #success
-1      mkdir   /opt/firefox/updates/0  #No such file or directory
-1      mkdir   /opt    #File exists
-1      mkdir   /opt/firefox    #File exists
0       mkdir   /opt/firefox/updates    #success
0       mkdir   /opt/firefox/updates/0  #success
9       open    /opt/firefox/updates/0/update.test      #success
0       unlink  /opt/firefox/updates/0/update.test      #success
...
27      open    /opt/firefox/update.test        #success
0       unlink  /opt/firefox/update.test        #success
27      open    /opt/firefox/updates/0/update.test      #success
0       unlink  /opt/firefox/updates/0/update.test      #success


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. download firefox-1.5rc2.tar.gz
2. extract to /opt/ as root
3. start as non-root user
        vs.
1. download firefox-1.5rc2.tar.gz
2. extract to /opt/ as root
3. start as root
4. start as non-root user

Actual Results:  
When starting Firefox as normal user, it pops up a message box twice saying something like "Firefox could not install this extension because of a failure in chrome registration", but continues nevertheless. This message only appears at first startup after upgrade or after removing ~/.mozilla/firefox.

If Firefox is started as root once directly after installtion, there is no error message.


Expected Results:  
Firefox should NEVER write anything into its installation directory, whether it actually has write access to it or not. The only directories where it may write to should be its profile and /tmp.

The described behaviour is reproducible for 1.5rc1 and 1.5rc2.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 311480 ***

Comment 2

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

v.