Blanking social.manifest.facebook and the Tools menu

[jamie500]

I'm typing this bug report here but not submitting it to Bugzilla just yet, because after quite a bit of Googling I can't seem to find anyone else affected.

Basically, after going into about:config and setting the value of social.manifest.facebook to an empty string, I now have an empty entry in the Tools menu between "Add-ons" and "Set up Sync". In 17.0.1 for Windows there is absolutely nothing there, in 17.0 for Linux there's an empty checkbox. Either way, clicking on the entry causes it to vanish and sets social.enabled to true.

Versions affected: 17.0.1 (64-bit Windows 7), 17.0 (64-bit Linux)

Steps to reproduce:
Go to about:config
Type social. into the search (may be the "filter" on Windows?) box.
Set social.sidebar.open and social.toast-notifications.enabled to false.
Set social.activation.whitelist to an empty string.
Check the Tools menu. So far all should be okay, with no entry between "Add-Ons" and "Set Up Sync"
Set social.manifest.facebook to an empty string.
Check the Tools menu again. The phantom entry should now be present. It remains present even if all add-ons are disabled.

As I stated, clicking on it causes it to disappear and sets social.enabled to true. I made copies of the prefs.js file before and after doing this and used diff to find out what changes had been made; this showed that social.enabled had changed value.

Actual results: Entry with no text in Tools menu between "Add-Ons" and "Set Up Sync". When clicked on, entry vanishes and a preference changes.

Expected results. Should be no new entry added to Tools menu. Menu entry should not vanish when clicked on, and should have a name providing some indication of what it does.

James McLaughlin.

[patrickjdempsey]

Many of the settings in about:config are for internal Firefox settings holders and are not designed to be directly modified by users. Any reason why you are messing with this? Social is strictly Opt-IN so you would have to visit the Facebook Chat installer page and manually allow it to install.

Also I see no blank entry using your methodology starting from a point of having no social addon/plugin/whatever installed.