If you use Firefox on Fedora and you currently lose your home page setting after updates please get in touch.
There is some kind of extremely stupid bug going on and people have been talking past each other about it for years. I will get down to the bottom of this.
Edit: more info here and here.
@lina Thank you for giving this attention. I had this happen a bunch of times when I was trying to daily Fedora and Asahi. The entire homepage and all my bookmarks would get replaced by the default ones.
At one point, the Fedora defaults replaced my saved tabs in Firefox sync, which made me loose all my bookmarks. That made me switch away from Fedora on my desktop, and stop using Asahi on my laptop, since the ARM Firefox Flatpak wasn't available yet.
@lina I don't know exactly when this happened, but I'd put it at about late 2024 to early 2025.
Really glad to see you trying to get down to the bottom of this, since it made me turn away from Asahi, and Fedora as a whole.
@prusa Did you restore a backup?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recover-lost-or-missing-bookmarks
Honestly that sounds like another Firefox Sync bug, like the home page issue... but there's more issues than that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/azgugt/i_lost_all_my_bookmarks_because_of_firefox_sync/
@lina I didn't know about backups back then. From what I remember, I started my desktop system up after an update, and opened Firefox.
When I opened Firefox, all my bookmarks were replaced with the default Fedora ones, and the homepage reset to the default Fedora one.
When I opened my laptop running macOS to do what I was about to do on my desktop system with Fedora, I realized that the changes from my desktop already propagated to all my devices with Firefox sync.
@prusa Breaking system files is, in general, never the answer to these problems.
The thing is, everyone who hits this gets irrationally angry at Fedora... there's horrible advice out there pointing at that file when that file is not the problem. There are entire arguments on Bugzilla about what should be done with that file. A change was even made in response to (incorrect, confused) advice from an affected user, then reverted. All this is a massive red herring. The problem is something else.
OS updates on Fedora never mess with your browser profile. They can't. It's the browser doing something weird, somehow triggered by OS updates, only for some people.
But nobody ever sat down with a developer to figure out what the real problem is...
@lina Agreed, I was relatively new to Linux back then, but I definitely know better than to mess with files managed by package managers.
I also felt like I wouldn't be able to file a good bug report, since I was so new to Linux then, and some previous experiences with asking for help turned me away from community forums and issue trackers.
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