Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Mozilla Firefox may reset custom browser preferences when the web browser is updated to a newer version so that the preference is set to its default value.
I was contacted by two Ghacks readers in the past two weeks about Firefox resetting preferences of the web browser during updates.
Jern informed me that Firefox reset the block lists setting of the browser's Tracking Protection feature from strict to basic when the browser was updated to version 50 from Firefox 49.0.2.
Basic protection is the recommended and default value of the setting. It does not block as many trackers as the strict blocking list. I confirmed that the upgrade to Firefox 50 did indeed reset the preference.
Michel told me a week later that a recent Firefox update (to 50.0.1 or 50.0.2) did reset another preference. This time an URL string that Michel modified on Firefox's about:config page.
Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2016/12/05/beware-firefox-updates-may-reset-preferences/
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:10PM
I literally can't recall the last time anything about FF actually improved for me. Yet just a few years ago I could compile it under Gentoo on a very old x86 system, and now it somehow requires 8 GB of RAM [mozilla.org] to compile. Bloat seems to be the goal as far as I can see. It's like they're trying to be the Windows OS of browsers.