858325 - Location bar and search box broken if appdata redirected to UNC path (20.0 regression)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 857672

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Chris Kloosterman]

After upgrading from Firefox 19.0.2 to 20.0 on my domain-joined Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit machine, the location bar and search bar have stopped working.  By stopped working, I mean that I can type in URLs and the bookmark search functionality does work, but clicking on a returned bookmark, pressing enter or pressing the "go" button to actually load a page does nothing.

Search box functionality is similar.  There are no search providers available, and typing in a search and pressing enter results in no action.  Attempts to manage search engine and add a new search engine do not do anything either.

I've tracked this down to the way our appdata folders are redirected (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders).  If I set the AppData key to "H:\AppData" then everything works as expected.  If I set it to "\\server\homedirectoryshare\username\Appdata" then it behaves as I have described above.  I have confirmed that both DFS and direct server mappings break the location bar and search box.

This is definitely a regression between 19.0.2 and 20.0, as it works again if I downgrade to 19.0.2.  it's a serious problem for us (and most enterprise environments that use file redirection), as we cannot upgrade to the latest security-supported release due to this major loss of critical browser functionality.

Comment 1

[mjh563]

See bug 857672.