If your Firefox settings are being reset, PLEASE HELP US
People have been reporting multiple related issues regarding Firefox preferences being randomly reset, possibly caused by multiple root cause bugs. Copying from the bug:
- Loss of homepage setting (revert to Fedora Start)
- Loss of bookmarks
- Loss of language or other settings
- Sync of these issues to other devices via Firefox Sync (including lost bookmarks)
- The problem may occur after (some or all) Firefox package updates
WHAT WE KNOW
- This behavior is NOT INTENTIONAL. There is no conspiracy to reset people's settings, nor is Fedora's configuration an intentional attempt to exploit a bug or behavior.
- This behavior is NOT UNIVERSAL. It happens to some people and not others. No maintainer has been able to reproduce it so far, which is why it has not been fixed.
- This behavior affects a MINORITY of users. While it has been reported repeatedly over the years, indicating that the issue is widespread, if it were happening to a significant fraction of Fedora users, the outcry would be orders of magnitude larger and a developer would have been able to reproduce it and fix it by now.
- This behavior is NOT EXPECTED. There is no logical explanation for why it happens or why it could happen. There is no "obvious" solution. It is not even clear that the problem has anything to do with Fedora's default setting overrides, as vanilla Firefox users have reported similar issues over the years. It seems that when it happens to Fedora users, users have a tendency to blame Fedora's preference overrides and complain loudly, but so far there is a lack of solid evidence that all of this behavior is tied to Fedora's preference overrides (other than one very specific issue described below).
WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU
If you are seeing any behavior similar to the above, PLEASE comment with as much detail as possible. Do not assume that anything about your setup will be the same for others. We need details such as:
- Your Fedora version (including spin/edition, etc.) and architecture
- Any important system customizations or changes such as file system or kernel
- Your desktop environment
- Information on all other systems synced with Firefox Sync to the same account, if you use it
- How you update your system (graphical tool,
dnf upgrade,dnf upgrade --offline, etc.) - A detailed walkthrough of what happened exactly when the issue occurred (when you (re)booted your machine(s), when you started or closed the browser(s), whether you clicked through any errors or messages, etc.)
- If it happened after an upgrade, whether your browser was running during the upgrade (and whether it complained or crashed).
- What exactly was lost/reset, and what the intended setting/value was previously.
If the issue happens OFTEN on every browser update, then please back up your browser configuration before each update using this command (you might need to dnf install rsync):
rsync -av --mkpath --exclude=storage ~/.mozilla ~/.config/mozilla ~/firefox-backups/$(date +%Y%m%d%-%H%M%S)
If you experience the issue after the update, run the command again to take another snapshot and comment here. The pre-upgrade and post-upgrade snapshots could be crucial in figuring out what went wrong.
I am personally volunteering to help gather debugging information for this issue. If you are comfortable, I would greatly appreciate it if we could have a real-time chat (over Matrix, Discord, or others) to try various things in order to track down the root cause of the problem.
IT IS IMPORTANT TO CATCH THE ISSUE IN THE ACT. "This used to happen to me but it no longer does / I no longer use Fedora / etc." is sadly a common response from users. Unfortunately, there is nothing developers can do to track down this issue if the person is not actively experiencing it.
IF YOU CAN REPRODUCE THE ISSUE AT WILL (for example, with dnf downgrade firefox and dnf upgrade firefox), then you hold the key to solving this once and for all. Please, please help.
IF YOU LOSE IMPORTANT DATA
If you lose your bookmarks, do not panic. Firefox automatically keeps backups of your bookmarks. Follow these instructions to restore them from an automatic backup:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recover-lost-or-missing-bookmarks
Once you get back your precious bookmarks, please come back and comment on exactly what happened. The more detailed feedback we get on what might cause this issue, the better.
KNOWN BUGS
So far there is ONE identified bug that is connected with system default overrides, but it only explains a very specific subset of the reports:
- When Firefox Sync is used, and
- The user syncs Fedora and non-Fedora systems, and
- The user sets their home page to Firefox Home -or- Fedora Start, then
- The browsers will "fight" over the home page setting, as they disagree on what the "default" is, and Firefox Sync handles this case poorly.
This bug is tracked as Fedora bug 2020436, and also upstream. The solution for this specific case, going forward, is for upstream to toggle a setting (that must be changed on all Firefox builds, not just Fedora's) to make the home page setting "sticky" and not consider the "browser default" value in a special way.
(All reports of this issue have been from users setting the home page to Firefox Home, but it is important to point out that the converse would also be a problem as far as the issue is understood: they would be unable to set Fedora Start as their home page consistently either. The underlying bug is symmetric, it does not "favor" Fedora.)
For those affected, there is a simple workaround: Set your home page to the URL about:home#, with a trailing #. This will avoid the "fighting over defaults" behavior.
This issue does NOT apply to people who:
- Do not use Firefox Sync, or
- Set their home page to anything else, or
- Experience reset of non-pref data like bookmarks
After reading the previous thread, I'm honestly really upset at how this has gone on for so long without any ability for maintainers to actually resolve the issue. Us developers NEED your help tracking this down. So far everyone experiencing it has just assumed that it happens all the time to everyone, because it happens to THEM all the time... and nothing has ever been fixed, because nobody with the ability to diagnose and debug it could ever reproduce the problem.