henk sanderson Reporter
	Description • 22 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021226 Debian/1.2.1-9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021226 Debian/1.2.1-9

when I create an user.js file (even by copying it from prefs.js) mozilla cannot
read its contents, but continues with this error message:
An error occurred reading the startup configuration file.  Please contact your
administrator.

SyntaxError: illegal character. # Mozilla User Preferences


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Copy prefs.js to user.js
2. Start mozilla from console by typing mozilla -profilemanager
3. Inspect the error output in the console

Actual Results:  
An error occurred reading the startup configuration file.  Please contact your
administrator.

SyntaxError: illegal character. # Mozilla User Preferences


Expected Results:  
interpret the contents of user.js correctly

	Patrick
	Comment 1 • 22 years ago

And is a completely blank user.js file parsed?
Are the attributes for the user.js file properly set?

	OstGote!
	Comment 2 • 22 years ago

In the user.js only lines beginning with // or user_pref are allowed. Remove the
first line

# Mozilla User Preferences

which comes from the prefs.js. Now it should work. Why? Don't ask me. But I
guess it is because all lines (except the comments) are copied to the prefs.js.

So it's a kind of bug 193638 or invalid.

	henk sanderson Reporter
	Comment 3 • 22 years ago

Removing line starting with # solves the problem. Leaves the question why these
lines are not skipped as well

	Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]
	Comment 4 • 22 years ago

Because the file is JS and '#' is not a comment char in JS.

	Benjamin Smedberg
	Comment 5 • 8 years ago

I don't think we're going to put effort into this.