@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?

@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.

@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

@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?

@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...

@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.

@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.

@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.

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

Great.