850697 - nsContentUtils does not pick up manual changes to the dom.idle-observers-api.enabled preference

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

nsContentUtils reads the dom.idle-observers-api.enabled preference at startup when executing nsContentUtils::Init() but does not react to changes to these preferences. Since nsContentUtils::Init() is invoked before Preferences::ResetAndReadUserPrefs() is called a value for this preference manually entered via about:config has no effect.

It is not clear if this was intended behavior or not hence the UNCONFIRMED status. The Navigator class uses this value to allow access to the idle observer API methods, detecting changes to this value might thus be tricky as some idle observers may have already been added before the value is turned to false. One would need to detect a situation where an idle observer API method has been called whilst dom.idle-observers-api.enabled was manually set to false and assert or at least log a warning message.