Can't change Firefox home page in Ubuntu MATE

[Luke Horwell]

The settings used to set the default Ubuntu MATE home page are currently always overriding the users' preferences, which defeats achieving a good user experience.

Steps to re-produce:

1) Open Firefox to the preferences page.
2) Set the home page to a different URL.
3) Close all instances of Firefox.
4) Open Firefox again, the Ubuntu MATE Start page has overwritten the preferences.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Dave Stroud (bigdavesr)]

Sorry but I think the importance should be set to high.

[vmc (vmclark)]

The only solution is to change to desired location here: /usr/lib/firefox/ubuntumate.cfg

[frenchy82 (cartes)]

You can delete too this line in the file and firefox will works like it should

[Dick Barmann (reb68)]

I have that line in a terminal.How can I change or delete it.

[GeorgeVita (georgevita)]

How to delete the "sticky" homepage:

Open a terminal window (ctrl-alt-t) and run:
gksudo pluma /usr/lib/firefox/ubuntumate.cfg

Enter your password, delete home page configuration line, save, exit.
Finally, set your homepage from preferences menu within firefox.

[Dave Stroud (bigdavesr)]

this is now occurring in gnome 17.04.

[Etienne Papegnies (etienne-papegnies)]

This also affects 17.04 Beta 2 apparently according to this review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-dVhs6YZMc

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

This is what we currently have set. Ubuntu's default Firefox overrides the default homepage so this sets it back to the default. But you get the same bug if you set a different webpage for broser.startup.homepage. (Ubuntu Mate uses http://start.ubuntu-mate.org/ ) I also duplicated this bug with Firefox on Windows.

$ cat /usr/lib/firefox/ubuntu-gnome.cfg
//
pref("browser.startup.homepage", "about:home");

$ $ cat defaults/pref/all-ubuntu-gnome.js
pref("general.config.obscure_value", 0);
pref("general.config.filename", "ubuntu-gnome.cfg");

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

To be clear, that last file is stored at /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref/all-ubuntu-gnome.js

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

This can be fixed by using defaultPref instead of pref

https://developer.mozilla.org/Firefox/Enterprise_deployment

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-gnome-default-settings - 17.04.3

---------------
ubuntu-gnome-default-settings (17.04.3) zesty; urgency=medium

  * Use defaultPref instead of pref to allow users to change the
    Firefox homepage (LP: #1605887)

 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Mon, 10 Apr 2017 05:50:30 -0400

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-mate-settings - 17.04.7

---------------
ubuntu-mate-settings (17.04.7) zesty; urgency=medium

  * Use defaultPref instead of pref to allow users to change the Firefox
    homepage (LP: #1605887)

 -- Martin Wimpress <email address hidden> Mon, 10 Apr 2017 11:06:43 +0100

[Richard Elkins (texadactyl)]

Easy work-around for a single user system:

sudo vi /usr/lib/firefox/ubuntumate.cfg
Set the pref value (2nd string) to the desired home page.

For me, the result was this:
pref("browser.startup.homepage", "file:///home/elkins/www/html/index.html");

[nmaxx (nmaxx)]

FYI, I ran into this bug again on the current 17.10 beta of Ubuntu MATE.

[nmaxx (nmaxx)]

I just checked /usr/lib/firefox/ubuntumate.cfg in Artful and instead of

defaultPref("browser.startup.homepage", "https://start.ubuntu-mate.org");

it is

pref("browser.startup.homepage", "https://start.ubuntu-mate.org");

Definitely a regression here, but it should be easy to fix.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

Yup, still (or again) present in Artful beta.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Fwiw, see bug 1721965 for the regression in Artful.

[scott-uu (scott-f-1)]

This bug is back in version 17.10 Ubuntu Mate.

[theloveiknow (theloveiknow701)]

why is this invalid if it is still happening today? please let us know?

[Luke Horwell (lah7)]

- Bugs against "ubuntu-mate" may be invalidated by the bug supervisor when they can be filed towards a specific package. (See after comment #11 for when that happened)
- Yakkety is EOL (end of life) and won't be possible to update that release anymore.

Please see bug 1721965 for Artful (17.10), as a fix is committed but not yet released.

[Coeur Noir (coeur-noir)]

Still a problem in 2021…