What is serviceworker.txt?

[manto]

I just noticed that my Profile folder is filled with text files named serviceworker.txt, serviceworker-1.txt, serviceworker-2.txt, ... serviceworker-500.txt, serviceworker-501.txt, ... etc.

I have hundreds of these files. All of them are 0 bytes.

According to their creation date, the first ones started appearing in late July. New files are getting created every day. I have no idea what I did to trigger this.

What in the world are these files? Can I safely delete them? How do I prevent their creation in the future?

[Reflective]

As a precaution download Malwarebytes and run a full scan. There have been reports on the web that those text files are being created by a virus but I don't know how accurate they are.

There's also a legitimate reason for them and a bug was filed accordingly, but that was fixed in FF47.

If there is virus activity taking place on your system Malwarebytes will no doubt fix it. If you already have another security application running it would be wise to disable it first. If you're only using Windows Defender you don't have to do anything since Malwarebytes will disable it automatically.

The premium version the link will take you to is valid for 14 days after which Malwarebytes will revert to the free version automatically albeit without anti-ransomware protection.

[TheVisitor]

As for the numbered files that generally happens when the file cannot be written to and Firefox generates another file... thus your hundreds of files. It's also possible that your security software is preventing write to that file - what are you using for your AV (Antivirus)

close Firefox
Open you profile where you see these
Delete them all - Firefox will create a fresh one. Keep an eye out and see if they keep building - should be only one file.

[manto]

As a precaution download Malwarebytes and run a full scan. There have been reports on the web that those text files are being created by a virus but I don't know how accurate they are.

There's also a legitimate reason for them and a bug was filed accordingly, but that was fixed in FF47.

I did a scan with Malwarebytes and everything is okay. I'm currently using FF 55.0.3. I don't know when FF last updated but it's entirely possible that this problem first arose with a previous version of FF.

As for the numbered files that generally happens when the file cannot be written to and Firefox generates another file... thus your hundreds of files. It's also possible that your security software is preventing write to that file - what are you using for your AV (Antivirus)

close Firefox
Open you profile where you see these
Delete them all - Firefox will create a fresh one. Keep an eye out and see if they keep building - should be only one file.

I'm using Norton Security Suite.

I've deleted all of the serviceworker.txt files. I found out that Service Workers isn't something that I care about anyway, so I went into about:config and changed dom.serviceWorkers.enabled to false. Hopefully this stops the files' creation.