1008761 - broken UI after upgrade to recent Firefox (menu bar hidden/disabled...)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140511030203

Steps to reproduce:

1. Upgrade from FF24.
2. Start a recent Firefox, like nightly.


Actual results:

The UI completely changed, with user config no longer taken into account and no obvious way to get that back. For instance, the menu bar no longer appears.


Expected results:

The old user config should have been kept whenever possible. In case of major changes, an upgrade page should explain what was changed and how to get things back.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Upgrading to 29, we present users with a tour of the new UI. It's also available in the Help menu ("Firefox Tour"). I don't think it's currently turned on for users on 32 (nightly). It's an interesting point. Matt, do you have thoughts about how/what to do here?

Comment 2

[Vincent Lefevre]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> Upgrading to 29, we present users with a tour of the new UI. It's also
> available in the Help menu ("Firefox Tour").

You're saying that it is available in the Help menu, but the new UI does not have a menu at all! So, how is the user supposed to know where to get the help???

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Vincent Lefevre from comment #2)
> (In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> > Upgrading to 29, we present users with a tour of the new UI. It's also
> > available in the Help menu ("Firefox Tour").
> 
> You're saying that it is available in the Help menu, but the new UI does not
> have a menu at all! So, how is the user supposed to know where to get the
> help???

The new UI does have a menu. The menu bar appears when you:
- hit alt or f10
- right click any of the other visible toolbars, and toggle it
- open customize mode and use the dropdown button there to toggle it.

The tour that normally appears for users highlights at least the last of these, and just pressing 'alt' is already pretty well-known with users of the menu. Finally, this change was Linux-specific, and has existed on Windows Vista and higher for the last 2-3 years or so.

The fact that we changed the default value of the pref for the autohidden menubar (and implemented support for doing so) isn't something we could really migrate well - as there was a different default before, every existing profile would have the default value, which means they would have no value in their prefs storage at all (we only store non-default values in the profile).

Ultimately, I think the main issue of this bug is that you weren't shown the tour, which would likely have addressed much of your confusion, and I'm checking with Matt if/how we can fix that.

Comment 4

[Vincent Lefevre]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #3)
> The new UI does have a menu. The menu bar appears when you:
> - hit alt or f10
> - right click any of the other visible toolbars, and toggle it
> - open customize mode and use the dropdown button there to toggle it.
> 
> The tour that normally appears for users highlights at least the last of
> these, and just pressing 'alt' is already pretty well-known with users of
> the menu. Finally, this change was Linux-specific, and has existed on
> Windows Vista and higher for the last 2-3 years or so.

OK, except that the fact that Alt or F10 makes the menu appear only temporarily... But that's sufficient to get the Help menu and the tour. However the tour doesn't say very much for users of previous FF versions, who would like their old settings back.

> The fact that we changed the default value of the pref for the autohidden
> menubar (and implemented support for doing so) isn't something we could
> really migrate well - as there was a different default before, every
> existing profile would have the default value, which means they would have
> no value in their prefs storage at all (we only store non-default values in
> the profile).

The fact that the default pref has changed isn't mentioned on:

  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-to-the-file-edit-and-view-menus

Another problem is that the add-on bar no longer appears. Again,

  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-firefox-controls-buttons-and-toolbars

isn't helpful (an obsolete document?).

> Ultimately, I think the main issue of this bug is that you weren't shown the
> tour, which would likely have addressed much of your confusion, and I'm
> checking with Matt if/how we can fix that.

And the tour is rather incomplete for those who spent time to configure Firefox as they like and want their old settings back. It should at least add a reference to perhaps something like:

  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-make-new-firefox-look-like-old-firefox

and make sure that the pages pointed to contain up-to-date information.

Comment 5

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

The tour from the help menu doesn't show the same landing page afterwards. The tour users did/will see upon upgrade to 29, 30 or 31 from a build prior to 29.0 is like https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/

At the end of the tour there are links to https://support.mozilla.org/kb/common-questions-after-updating-to-new-firefox and https://support.mozilla.org/kb/what-happened-to-the-add-on-bar

We weren't planning on showing the tour for 32.0 and showing it only when upgrading from certain versions requires manual work on the part of RelEng when they generate update snippets and I don't think this affects enough users to be worth the effort to do that on Beta/Aurora/Nightly.

Also note that I believe we did preserve the user's preference for the menu bar if they ever expressed a preference via toggling it. Of course most users who wanted the menu bar probably didn't toggle it though since it was the default.

Comment 6

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Too late now to do anything about this.