[Intermittent] A small number of new profiles wrongly turn off Activity Stream in Beta

[SoftVision-CiprianMuresan]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403573

[Notes]:

• The issue is very intermittent, but I can manage to reproduce it at least on one profile out of ~15.
• Activity Stream appears to be turned off in about:config after you reproduce the issue.

[Affected versions]:

• Firefox 56.0b3 Build ID 20170925150345

[Affected Platforms]:

• All Windows
• All Mac
• All Linux

[Steps to reproduce]:

1. Create a new Firefox profile and open the browser.
2. Open a New Tab.
3. Click the Search arrow button.
4. Open a few more tabs (~6) and observe the behavior.

[Expected results]:

• Activity Stream is displayed on all opened new tabs.

[Actual results]:

• The last tab opened has the old New Tab page.

[Additional notes]:

• No errors appear in the Browser Console.
• I haven't managed to reproduce the issue on Nightly.
• Attached a screen recording of the issue:
  

[jaredlockhart]

Can you please change this pref:

extensions.shield-recipe-client.logging.level

to this value:

0

And then recreate these steps, open up the browser console: cmd + shift + j

and copy paste all the output into a gist.

[jaredlockhart]

Also when you reproduced this in 57b3 did you reuse the same profile from 56 or create a new one?

[SoftVision-CiprianMuresan]

Also when you reproduced this in 57b3 did you reuse the same profile from 56 or create a new one?

No, all of the profiles I used were newly created profiles.
I'll try the same scenario with that pref set tomorrow though.

[jaredlockhart]

Ah, found it. There is an active Shield experiment which will disable Activity Stream for some users. We are disabling it now and this behaviour should correct itself.

[Mardak]

@jaredkerim did that shield study get disabled? In some bug or somewhere to link to and track?