937712 - Extensions and bookmarks disappeared after upgrade

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Glenn McGrew II]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131025151332

Steps to reproduce:

I upgraded from v24 to v25 on two different HP laptops.


Actual results:

Almost all of my extensions disappeared (not disabled), the remaining ones (avast online security on both, avg toolbar on this one) were disabled.  I had to manually set about getting add-ons again.

All of my bookmarks disappeared.  I was able to restore my bookmarks from the backup in the profile folder.

My plug-ins were, AFAIK, unaffected.  I only use the default appearance scheme.


Expected results:

I see there was a similar report earlier this year that shows as having been fixed, but clearly this is not the case for me.

I expect, as with any other upgrade, for all of the customizations I have made to the browser to remain available to me.

Add-ons shouldn't ever disappear or be disabled if they are valid.  Disabling should include a note as to why it is disabled (eg: incompatible, security threat, no longer produced).

Bookmarks should automatically be restored when a new version is installed.

Comment 1

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

The installer doesn't touch profiles where the bookmarks, etc. are located so moving back to untriaged for further / correct triage.

Comment 2

[Glenn McGrew II]

A very strange thing happened.  When I got up today to use my computer, all the new add-ons I'd installed had disappeared and the old ones were back.  I do NOT understand what happened.  I don't know whether to be happy or irritated.

Comment 3

[[:Aleksej]]

You may want to look at your Firefox profiles.  Maybe you have multiple profiles and accidentally switched between them, or maybe Firefox wasn't showing things that actually were in your profile.

Here are some (old) articles about profiles: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Profiles

Comment 4

[Mark Callow]

I am in the middle of this nightmare now. It has NOTHING to do with profiles. I do not have any profiles set up. It also has NOTHING to do with the installer as things were fine right after the latest upgrade. It looks like a bug, and a very, very serious one, in Firefox.

I have 3 machines connected via Firefox sync. One is running FF25 on the release channel, the other FF 26 on the beta channel. Yesterday (or possibly the day before) yet another update (beta 6, I think) came through for FF26 and was installed. When I went home yesterday I left 2 of the machines running & my bookmarks were OK. When I came in to work this morning, all my bookmarks had vanished from both machines (empty bookmarks toolbar and empty "show all bookmarks") and, as I write this, sync is attempting to delete extensions as well.

I can't tell whether the bookmarks were lost first and the loss propagated via sync or if this is a bug in sync. I've been using sync ever since it first became available and I've never had this kind of problem before so I tend to think the bookmarks disappeared on one machine first.

I booted the 3rd machine which is running 24.0.1 and my bookmarks are still there. I quickly backed them up and exited that Firefox. I then tried to restore those bookmarks on one of the other machines. I went through the dialogs. No errors were reported but no bookmarks were restored. I tried twice. I still have zero bookmarks. I looked at the backup file; it has lots of bookmarks and looks like a valid JSON file.

BTW, FF 24 did not append .json to the end of the file name when I created the backup yet FF 25 tells me the file has an invalid format, unless it has the extension .json.

To cap it all, Reset Sync is not working. I am trying to do it on the machine that still has its bookmarks. The first dialog comes up with the radio buttons. I select "Replace all other devices with this device's data" and click Next. The Confirm dialog that appears usually doesn't list any devices. It seems I have to wait some considerable time after FF has started before launching "Reset Sync" or else no devices appear.

When I can finally get the dialog to open with devices shown and I click next, the Confirm dialog disappears then ... nothing. Some DELETE, A lot of POST and a few GET messages appear in the browser console so perhaps the sync happened but there is no user feedback.

However when I try Reset Sync on the machines where the data has been lost, I  select "Replace all data on this device with my sync data", click Next so the confirmation dialog appears then click Next in the confirmation dialog. Nothing happens. There no user feedback and there are no messages in the browser console. Nothing.

Remarkably the Confirm dialog claims that there are 12 bookmarks I would be replacing. It is remarkable because "Show All Bookmarks" shows nothing, not even empty folders. When "Show All Bookmarks" opens the following error appears in the browser console:

NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE: Component returned failure code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsINavBookmarksService.getItemTitle]

All in all this a colossal cock up on many fronts.

Comment 5

[Mark Callow]

> I have 3 machines connected via Firefox sync. One is running
> FF25 on the release channel, the other FF 26 on the beta channel.

Oops, missed the 3rd machine, that was off. It was running FF 24 and has now been upgraded to 25.0.1. The on machine running 25.0.1 may have been recently upgraded from 24. I can't be sure. The updates come so thick and fast.

Comment 6

[Mark Callow]

It goes from bad to worse. The on machine running 25.0.1 has somehow disconnected itself from FF Sync. This is the machine where I tried to load the bookmarks backup. Maybe the act of trying to do that disconnected it.

Comment 7

[Mark Callow]

The bookmarks file (places.sqlite) appears to have somehow been corrupted during the update. sync was failing due to the corrupt bookmarks file. I deleted that file from my profile and clicked "Sync now". My bookmarks are back now and everything else seems to have been successfully sync'ed.

I do not have any idea how places.sqlite became corrupted during an FF update, nor can I explain the disappearing add-ons.

I suggest that the message bar that appears to tell you that sync did not complete, contain a button to click to see the sync log so users do have to start searching the web to find out how to debug sync problems.

Now if I can just convince Mozilla to maintain the great older sync functionality and stop forcing people to go through an inconvenient and troublesome process to change to the less secure new sync... I had BE on side before he was unceremoniously dumped as President.

Comment 8

[Paul Pasca[Away. Please needinfo? Paul Oiegas [:pauloiegasSV]]]

Hi reporter,

I didn't encounter this issue when I updated Firefox to the last version 43.0.4.

Can you please try to reproduce this on the latest release(43.0.4) and latest Nightly(46.0a1) and provide the results? When doing this, please try to reproduce with a new clean Firefox profile, maybe even in safe mode, as some of this issues may be caused by third party installed add-ons or custom settings(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems).

Thanks,
Paul.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

reporter appears to be gone