Firefox users beware: CCleaner wipes Firefox extension settings by default

[harlan4096]

Firefox users who run the temporary file cleaner CCleaner on their systems may have noticed that extension settings are removed after running the program. The issue affects all recent versions of CCleaner and devices with Firefox 79 or newer installed.

What makes the issue particularly troublesome is that Firefox users informed Piriform, the maker of CCleaner, about the issue on July 1 when Firefox 79 was released to the Beta channel. Firefox 79 Stable was released on July 29, 2020 and users started to experience the issue from that day forward.

Update: the latest version of CCleaner fixes the issue. End
 Mozilla implemented an option in Firefox 79 to sync extension data using the browser's built-in synchronization feature. Users who sign-in with a Firefox Account can use the functionality to sync extension data across all devices Firefox is running on.
 

Extension data that had been stored locally in existing profiles will automatically migrate the first time an installed extension tries to access storage.sync data in Firefox 79. After the migration, the data will be stored locally in a new storage-sync2.sqlite file in the profile directory.

Firefox creates new files in the profile folder when that happens:

• Storage-sync-v2.sqlite
  
• Storage-sync-v2-sqlite-shm
  
• storage-sync-v2.sqlite-wal
  

CCleaner, unaware of the change, will delete two of the files when it is run (the last two) as shm and wal files are considered Internet cache items and thus deleted by the program.
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