Strange bug

General discussion about the NoScript extension for Firefox
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tingo
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Joined: Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:51 pm

Strange bug

Post by tingo »

I've used NoScript for years, never changed anything to it, especially when I shut down yesterday. Neither have I changed anything in Firefox. Yet, when launching it this morning, all the sites whitelisted for years had been reset. After some amount of searching on the net, I found that this information was stored in the Profiles/~/prefs.js file. Replacing it with yesterday's backup brought the accumulated NoScript settings back again.

Can anyone tell me what happened, and what can be done to prevent it in the future? Thanks.
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Giorgio Maone
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Re: Strange bug

Post by Giorgio Maone »

From time to time (very rarely, hopefully) the prefs.js file might get corrupted if something goes wrong while it gets written on the disk.
A good reason for making periodic backups of your profile directory.
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tingo
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Joined: Sat Dec 23, 2017 2:51 pm

Re: Strange bug

Post by tingo »

Grazie, Giorgio. Yes, I backup my whole library at least once a day, and yes, hopefully, this kind of occurrence will remain a rare one. But it took me quite a stressful while to figure out where NoScript's information was stored. For other users, maybe this should be highlighted somewhere, somehow?
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Giorgio Maone
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Re: Strange bug

Post by Giorgio Maone »

tingo wrote:Grazie, Giorgio. Yes, I backup my whole library at least once a day, and yes, hopefully, this kind of occurrence will remain a rare one. But it took me quite a stressful while to figure out where NoScript's information was stored. For other users, maybe this should be highlighted somewhere, somehow?
All user preferences, both for the browser and for its add-ons, are stored in prefs.js up until Firefox 57.
From then on, WebExtensions use a completely different storage layer.
So the problem, when it (rarely) happens, is much wider than "NoScript's whitelist got reset", and it's gonna affect fewer and fewer people as time passes.
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