1212086 - Remove the linkify phone number feature

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Back in bug 566225, we landed a feature to linkify phone numbers in a page, but it was disabled by default for performance reasons (you can toggle the "browser.ui.linkify.phone" pref in about:config).

In bug 957345, there was a discussion about whether or not to enable this by default, but we were still worried about the performance cost.

At this point, I think we should just remove the code for this, since I don't think we have a good performance solution. This should actually work pretty well as an add-on, so we could make it into an add-on for people who still want to use this. However, I imagine not many people use this, since it's only available in about:config.

Barbara, what do you think?

Comment 1

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

To be clear, will this keep the ability to open phone numbers when selecting text that contains a phone number?

Comment 2

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #1)
> To be clear, will this keep the ability to open phone numbers when selecting
> text that contains a phone number?

I believe so, yes. That feature doesn't suffer the same performance costs, so it's enabled, and we should keep it that way :)

Comment 3

[Barbara Bermes [:barbara] - NI please!]

As long as the commonly-used href=tel works, I'm fine to remove it.

Do we have data around the usage of "browser.ui.linkify.phone" pref in about:config? I couldn't find it in UI telemetry.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to Barbara Bermes [:barbara] from comment #3)
> As long as the commonly-used href=tel works, I'm fine to remove it.
> 
> Do we have data around the usage of "browser.ui.linkify.phone" pref in
> about:config? I couldn't find it in UI telemetry.

UI Telemetry for "settings" only covers the visible controls in our Settings UI. We don't cover all possible preferences via about:config. It's possible to add some support for editing prefs in about:config, but no use case has presented itself.

Comment 5

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 6

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

This was removed as part of the Geckoview/Fennec split. There is still the about:config pref but I filed bug 1644951 for auditing that.