diegocr / prefmon

Track your Firefox's (about:config) preferences for unwanted changes.

Prefences Monitor aka, PrefMon - Mozilla Firefox Extension

Over the time one of the most common complains from users is about add-ons which suddenly changed Firefox preferences without their knowledge. This gave the idea to create this add-on... Preferences Monitor will watch for changes on the about:config preferences and notify you of what was changed exactly.

There are three scenarios regarding changes:

1. Changes made by Firefox itself.

2. Changes made by extensions to its own preferences.

3. Changes made by extensions to private Firefox preferences.

All of them will be notified on the ErrorConsole, while those of point 3 will be notified with a NotificationBox as well (see screenshot), in such NotificationBox you have a "More Info" button which you can use to open the ErrorConsole. There will be maintained a single NotificationBox at a time, if several changes are noticed simultaneously an asterisk will be added to the button (will become "More Info*")

Additionally it also allows you to automatically or manually revert any changes made, saving console messages to a file on your hard disk for later inspection, or recently the eCleaner add-on has been merged into PrefMon, which allows you to remove garbage left by extensions after uninstallation.

Please refer to the AMO listing page for further details:

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/preferences-monitor/

If you would like to help testing by installing PrefMon straight from this repository, you can do so by using GitHubExtIns.

prefmon's Issues

error?: unmatched ) in bootstrap.js line 286

I'm getting a persistent and frequent error in the browser error console referring to line 286 in boostrap.js. That line is indicated below (copied the whole function for reference). I don't see any problem with it myself, but seeing the error so frequently I thought I would report it and let you make the call. It could be this Mozilla-based browser is misreporting it.

    u: function(k,v,j) {
        this.prefs[k] = v;
        let l = !j && this.prefs[TP[0]];
        if(l) try {
            if(new RegExp(l,'i').test(k)) {       /* <----  this line */

                let p = this.prefs[TP[4]],
                    o = p && JSON.parse(p) || {};
                o[k] = v;
                this.s(TP[4],this.prefs[TP[4]] = JSON.stringify(o));
            }
        } catch(e) {
            Cu.reportError(e);
        }
    },

And this is the error reported:
Timestamp: 9/12/2014 5:01:41 PM
Error: unmatched ) in regular expression
Source File: resource://gre/modules/XPIProvider.jsm -> jar:file:///C:/Users/[me]/AppData/Roaming/[path to profile folder]/extensions/%7B517f9e52-c795-4764-bf77-5e2db596cee6%7D.xpi!/bootstrap.js
Line: 286

Similar but less frequent report also for line 608 which looks similar to me. Sorry to bother you if this is not a real error in the code.

Improve eCleaner

Hi. There isn't yet any other good solutions to clean uninstalled add-ons leftovers. Here are some suggestions to improve eCleaner:

• Option to hide default entries.
• Option to hide installed add-ons entries.
• Show which entries belong to which add-ons.

And by the way, could you make an standalone eCleaner please? It's much needed.
Thanks.

User Agent Overrider (still)

Sorry to open this as a new issue (I cannot re-open the closed issue).

This still (newest version of Preferences Monitor) undoes the changes to the user agent on startup even if you add the string you kindly suggested. And for some reason as it does it on startup there is no option to whitelist. However, it is no longer an empty string after the change (it returns to being the actual user agent).

PrefMon doesn't seem to know how to handle extensions with unusual names

Disconnect Search ( https://disconnect.me/search ), which is logged to the console by PrefMon simply as "Disconnect Search", doesn't seem to be possible to whitelist at present. It's changing proxy and search engine preferences. I've tried whitelisting via 'Disconnect Search:.*', which doesn't work. I'm not sure if I need an extension GUID here, or one of those very odd JetPack ("SDK") identifiers.

If I do need an extension GUID, it sure would be nice if PrefMon could find it on its own, or help me find it.

BluHell XML Malformed Error

First, a confession. This is a bug report for BlueHell Firewall, and I didn't want to create yet another account at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=2318993 to file a bug report in a user forum where I wasn't sure anyone would see it anyhow.

When going to a blocked site (iljmp.com, which is appropriately blocked for spam), instead of seeing the usual BlueHell blocked page (which I have seen many times before), this time I saw an XML malformed error message, specifically:

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity Location: jar:file:///%APPDATA%/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/skc-ff/extensions/%7B6BB5760D-F97E-421B-AF5B-8457A90C3CED%7D.xpi!/blocked.xhtml?t=1794dbc0-4b13-4661-8fea-fa496bb02f62&h=aWxqbXAuY29t&u=aHR0cDovL2lsam1wLmNvbS8= Line Number 69, Column 18:
<h1>Site &blocklist.blocked.label;!</h1>

Bug report from an Snap Links Plus user that was found to be related to Pref Monitor too

See this closed github ticket:

cpriest/SnapLinksPlus#37 (comment)

Just thought I'd pass along the report.

Conflict with User Agent Overrider

This has a conflict with the extension found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-overrider/

Preferences Monitor by default changes settings that the User Agent Overrider changes and so they fight it out, so to speak, and the end result is an empty string (which disables some sites). One way to get it working is to make PrefMon not reverse any changes automatically, but this seems like an unsatisfying solution. Also, why would the string end up being empty?

Some features not working in Firefox portable

Installed: Preferences Monitor 3.6.1.1-signed.1-let-fixed.1-signed
Following features are not working in Firefox 46.0.1 portable:
Preferences Guard
Console Logging
Misc Options
When I check the boxes to activate the above features, the check marks do not stick, but are gone the next I open the plugin options. Also, the Ask to Revert Changes feature remains checked, but I am never asked to revert any changes, so I doubt it is working.

I have used this plugin for years and these options are important to me. If you can fix this I will absolutely make a decent donation.

Whitelist everything done by a specified extension

Greetings! I am trying out an extension called SmoothWheel. Apparently, this extension sets and modifies preferences constantly. The result is that PrefMon displays an endless stream of notifications. I would like to whitelist this extension entirely. Is there a way to do/encode this?

Best regards,

Doesn't work anymore

Doesn't work anymore since some versions ago, but really only noticed in Firefox 47.