Mastodawn

Juan Traverso Apr 2

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

This thread is such a massive failure of the community bug reporting process.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/1s8jevj/a_message_to_fedora_devs_please_stop_interfering/

Apparently there's a small but significant fraction of users who see their browser home reset to the Fedora Home on Firefox updates or other circumstances... and they're all convinced this is some kind of evil intentional Fedora packaging feature that hijacks your preferences on every update, and that it must happen to everyone (it does not).

So far there is one known hypothesis for why this can happen (it involves Firefox Sync), but that doesn't cover all instances because some affected users claim not to use Sync. I reported this one upstream so hopefully there will be a solution soon. Nobody had until now...

Meanwhile, not a single affected user has bothered to write up reliable repro steps or follow through with maintainers on tracking down the root cause.

I've also looked at upstream bugs and found several shaped like "Firefox lost my prefs on upgrade", but none of them were followed through to a root cause either.

Of course, when Firefox loses the home page pref and it reverts to about:home, people shrug and set it back... but when Fedora Firefox does the same and it reverts to start.fedoraproject.org, it's clearly a Red Hat conspiracy to hijack people's browsers and they demand Fedora remove the default home page branding override entirely, instead of working with a developer to get the bug fixed...

@lina I mean, shouldn't the AI just figure it out? Mozilla tells us that Anthropic is finding Firefox bugs, is Fedora just holding it wrong?

Jennifer 🏳️‍⚧️Apr 2

@lina I've had this issue for years, every time I have tried Fedora the last decade its Firefox was resetting the home page at every updates.

So why are people making such a noise about it now?

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@transcendentempress Because apparently everyone who has it happen thinks it always happens, and nobody actually bothers to report the bug, and then someone sees it on Fedora and thinks it's intentional, and it turns into an echo chamber of people spreading FUD saying it's all an evil Red Hat plot.

If you are experiencing a bug, *especially* if you are experiencing it consistently and reproducibly... please report it.

I have never, not once, seen this in over a decade of using Firefox, both on Fedora and not.

Jennifer 🏳️‍⚧️Apr 2

@lina Ah, it was before I run any Linux as main, I encountered it during distros testing sessions so I noticed but didn't actually paid too much attention to it beyond "oh so it's still doing it".

And I've never had it again since my switch last year to OSTree Fedora-based distros like Bazzite or Aurora

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@transcendentempress I just did a manual test with FF 143 -> 144 -> 149 and it was fine...

I wonder if it has something to do with upgrading Firefox while it's running? That has a habit of crashing it, I wonder if that somehow corrupts preferences?

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@transcendentempress I just tried Firefox 119 in a Fedora 39 distrobox. Upgraded to 132, no reset. Carried over the profile to 149 on F43, no reset.

I really don't understand how some people could hit this all the time and some people never saw it...

Jennifer 🏳️‍⚧️Apr 2

@lina Hence why, thinking about how it was back then when I briefly tried to understand the behavior, some years ago it was very probably less a bug than a custom default setting in the Fedora-build package, as they were actually changing oob the Firefox default home page for a Fedora web portal, and that setting was seemingly reapplied at every big updates. Setting they might have since abandoned.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@transcendentempress No, that setting is and has always been there. It's a defaults change. You and everyone else seeing this bug are incorrectly assuming it is "applied on updates". It never was, and there never was any (intentional) mechanism for it to be.

It is, and has always been, a bug. But everyone who hits it assumes it's evil packaging.

If you think about it for a second, that assumption never made sense. System package updates have no ability to reach in and overwrite user profile settings with something else. The only thing the package does is change the out of the box default. It can't wipe your settings. Only something at runtime, on first startup, in Firefox itself, can. And Fedora sure isn't patching Firefox to do that.

The test I did started with the Fedora default portal, as it is still the default. And after I changed it once, it never came back after the updates. Nor have I ever experienced this myself in years of normal use.

Jennifer 🏳️‍⚧️Apr 2

@lina Well I'm speaking only for myself but I never seen any ill intent in that, I've always been like that's just how it apparently works, and again I never actually really cared about it beyond that. Especially as I'm using Fedora-based distros these days and never encountered it with them (also I'm not especially using base Firefox these days, so).

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@transcendentempress That's fair, but like, sigh.

It's really sad that in all these years nobody sat down and actually reported this properly... and we still don't know what causes it.

Jennifer 🏳️‍⚧️Apr 2

@lina Tbh I wasn't the kind of person likely to report that as a bug, as again I was only noticing it during some distro hopping, I wasn't on a bug hunt or anything. And also if someone's thinking, like I did because of my only temporary usage of it, it's just some kind of custom default setting behavior, it's even less likely that they're gonna report it as a bug.

But I understand it gets annoying when there are actually people becoming very vocal about it without asking themselves the right questions.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@transcendentempress I DMed the person who started that Reddit thread, but I'm going to be so annoyed if they don't want to help...

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@transcendentempress "I don't use Fedora any more".

Great.

m_on_stair Apr 3

@lina @transcendentempress

i realize that what youre complaining about is very unrelated but reading this thread made me realize that the last 10 bugs i reported to open source projects (all with reproducers) have not been fixed (and likely wont be)

i think the last one that was fixed was a kitty bug, honestly props to kovidgoyal

but yeah, a bit demotivating nowadays

(but again, a separate issue than people not even considering reporting)

Jennifer 🏳️‍⚧️Apr 3

@lina Oh, so it was someone complaining about something they don't currently use. Again.😩

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 3

@transcendentempress Aaaaa I found another "it's broken fix it repro is to set the home page" everyone talking past each other thread again....

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2353895

OMG will someone ever sit down and get this fixed?

2353895 – Please stop overriding user settings on every update

@lina probably would need to compare about:config listings or whole profile between someone who experiences this consistently and someone who doesn’t. Probably 1 setting in there that was set that would otherwise seem mundane.

commdserv Apr 2

@lina Well the branded homepage usually sucks, and getting homepage reset must be frustrating and annoying. Maybe learn from opensuse, who has branding-opensuse and branding-upstream, thus free from this issue.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@commdserv That's still just a workaround for the bug. There's no reason for the home page to be reset to begin with.

commdserv Apr 2

@lina True this is a workaround, but for now it might be needed to calm people down, so that actual troubleshooing may begin...
Due to the "persistent" nature, will btrfs snapshots on firefox folder work? By comparing changes between versions.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@commdserv Just anyone who consistently sees this issue on upgrades sharing their profile directory would be a good start to try to diagnose it... maybe even just the prefs.js file.

Ideally you want a profile dir snapshot prior to the first run with an upgraded version, along with the version known to trigger the reset on that profile.

Reminds me of Fry yelling Fix it Fix it..

Syl (Sylvia Bun) :enby_inside:

@lina I literally jumped in this thread last night to tell people it's not intentional and people are just being ridiculously hostile about it, I swear some end users just refuse to acknowledge that mistakes happen and can be insanely hard to find and diagnose

@lina I would imagine it's because of the corporate link with Red Hat and it is something Microsoft would do.

Tóth Gábor Baltazár Apr 2

@lina
I'm recently having issues with firefox failing to open with something about failed to save changes

even after understanding that code that shows that message I have no idea how it could happen

my crappy hypothesis is firefox might be hitting some kernel bug related to file locking

wouldn't be surprised if firefox is trying to update the prefs file and the locking freaks out and it wipes the file

Chaddicus Apr 2

@lina if it's a conspiracy, it's a pretty bad one...what about all the other browsers?

@lina there was once where the branded start page bugs me and proceed to use the flatpak since I can't make it unbranded (me dumb probably)

@lina i run firefox for a least three years from 41 to 43 i think, in this time i use firefox AND librewolf and both works whell and never show this behavior...

But in Linux Mint this happend once, but as a lazy linux user i just look at this and think "Meh i will change", and never does it appears again.

I run Linux Mint for 3 years now and i pretty shure i update between two versions in this peruond and see this in first version update....

@lina i can kinda understand many people not bothering, Bugzilla isn't the most intuitive if you're not used to it, plus it requires creating a account (no OAuth providers which users might already have) so its overall a hassle. Should that be a big deal? no. But its certainly a hurdle that might bounce a bunch of people. Plus, i'm not sure about fedora, but for KDE which also uses Bugzilla theres a few issues especially for non-develoeprs i've noticed with Bugzilla as a system:

a lot of categories (prpduct, component), and while they try to guide you through it with descriptions, that only sets the "product" not the "component" (for those, theres no guidance)
reporting gives me options i'm pretty sure should be exclusive to maintainers, like severity
no visible roles, i don't know if i'm talking to a maintainer/codeowner, a regular contributor, or a completely random person who also just signed up
no text formatting options, just plaintext. no markup, no wysiwyg, no lists or titles or code-blocks
hard to read bug lists/search results
upon opening an existing bug, i can, for some reason, edit fields like URL, Keywords, Latest Commit, Depends on, Blocks

None of these are enormous issued individually, but they stack up, so i can understand pretty well why people might bounce off of that. I almost did and i'm a developer. At some point, the hassle of writing a bug report is larger than the hassle of dealing with the issue or... writing a forum post in the hopes it'll be seen by the developers. Developers who, by their choice of system, communicate to users that "this is not a place for normal users"

So yeah, i'm sitting on a few small nitpicks/"issues" which i've just not cared to report because its a hassle and i wouldn't even know which of the categories to choose. And like, maybe Fedoras bugzilla is better organized and these issues are with KDEs Bugzilla specifically, but from looking at it for a bit i don't think so.

@lina I also understand theres an argument to be made that the system can't be sobsimple it invites a lot of useless/unactionable/spam reports.

Theres also a culture issue in there somewhere: While this hasn't happened to me personally with the bug projects on account of me having written like, 2 issues total on any Bugzilla, looking for issues i see pretty often that a bug report which is lacking some into just gets closed or seemingly ignored, instead of asking for that info. Don't get me wrong, smaller or newer projects suffer from similar problems (like the absolutely horrid invention called "closed for being stale" or in more recent times LLM-bots trying to "resolve" issues by hallucinating non-existent infos) but overall, i've had far more luck at least knowing where the developers stand with projects using more approachable bugtrackers, like the ones included in git-forges.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@laund I get all that, but this is all kind of irrelevant. Those are all general issues that affect the likelihood of user bug reports, that's fair.

The issue is that with *this* particular bug almost nobody bothered to report it, and the few who did, did not usefully follow up, despite it apparently being a fairly widespread problem. That's not normal. It's not explainable by bugzilla friction. The issue seems to be that, somehow, lots of people just assumed it was intentional behavior and not a bug.

the bug teport you linked has been around for a while
theres older bug reports which got blanket closed because they happen to be linked to a EOL version of fedora
theres no way to upvote/+1 a Bugzilla bug without commenting, which in most places is pretty discouraged as it notifies every participant
theres a lot of non-bugreport forum posts about it a simple search engine search can find
you have to read pretty deep into the existing bug reports to know whether its actually considered a bug or just something someone reported as a bug that wasn't fixed. Plus, again, no way to know who's a developer or random person, so how do you know the person talking about it being a bug is someone who can make that decision for the project?

sooo yeah, the usability issues of bugzilla are definitely a factor here. if i came across it, saw an open issue, saw i would have to make an account and comment "happened to me just now" and probably get yelled at for useless pings? Yeah, i'd not do anything. Its what i've done for quite a few things. If i came back 2 years and just saw some people talking about trying to find a workaround? At some point its not unreasonable to assume that its intentional or at least something nobody with push perms to fedora/the packages cares about. All the while its entirely possible the people trying to find a fix are in fact maintainers and i just didn't know.

Would this have been avoided by more and better bug reports? Yup, definitely, and it would be really nice if this would happen. Would this have been avoided by clearly communicating, in a way people tend to actually see and understand (read as: without having to scroll, read multiple pages of text, or needing to know the maintainers by username), that its a unintended bug? Also yes. One of these is blaming users behaviour, an issues which is only addressable by communication/"PR", the other is pointing out where that communication fails.

@lina sorry if i'm kinda going off on this here, i know you're not Fedora, but it kinda rubbed me the wrong way that you seemd to basically just be blaming users here without including some kind of consideration for why users might reach that conclusion or what the general issues leading to these kinds of situations are.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@laund I'm not *blaming* users. I'm describing the reality of the situation that a disproportionate number of people, including those commenting on this thread even, for better or worse, made the incorrect assumption that the behavior is intentional.

That is not normal. That is what makes this bug extremely frustrating. That is why this hasn't been addressed despite widespread impact. I'm not saying it's users' fault. I'm saying it happened.

Would it have been addressed if bugzilla were easier to use? Yeah probably.

But bugs of this impact are almost always fixed despite those flaws in the process. This one is an outlier.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@laund BTW, maintainers are highlighted in red.

@lina not for me. Do you have to be logged-in to see that? The icon doesn't show either.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@laund Yes, you have to be logged in.