1031045 - WiFi device scan triggers firewall popup on Windows

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: about:debugging, defect, P3)

Description

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

In bug 975591, the WebIDE runtime list start scanning for WiFi devices on click.  (For now you need to set the pref "devtools.remote.wifi.scan" first.)

This is fine for OS X and Linux, but on Windows it triggers a firewall popup since Firefox starts a server to make the scanning work.  Since you may not care about WiFi devices (since there are other things in the runtime list too), the UX is a bit odd.

Note that the firewall popup only appears if you haven't previously approved Firefox for this purpose, so it's a one-time dialog, assuming you agree.

In bug 975591 comment 15, Paul suggested:

When the runtime panel shows up, don't scan right away, add a button "Scan WiFi", on click:
1. prevent the panel to close if focus change
2. start scanning (windows popups shows up)
3. after a couple of seconds, or on close, reset focus behavior
4. show a throbber
5. show results

Something like this seems workable.  Not sure if want it like this for all OSes or just Windows?  I guess it's easier to maintain when they are all the same.

Comment 1

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Paul, if you have time, could you look at this?  No rush, just thinking you'll do it faster than me.

It's a little sad to have a button to click each time you want to scan for devices though...  Maybe try it out once on Windows to see how it feels to you.  Maybe it's okay that a dialog shows up?  I can't decide.  If a button seems best, maybe we should only have it on Windows.

Comment 2

[Paul Rouget [:paul]]

Maybe we can add a button "Enable Wifi Scanning" in the panel. That would turn on the pref "devtools.remote.wifi.scan" to true and trigger wifi scanning. So the user will need to click on the button only once (and see the popup). Then opening the popup again will trigger the scanning automatically, with no popup.

Does that make sense?

If we use this pref (devtools.remote.wifi.scan) we will need another pref to hide the button too.

Comment 3

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

(In reply to Paul Rouget [:paul] (slow to respond. Ping me on IRC) from comment #2)
> Maybe we can add a button "Enable Wifi Scanning" in the panel. That would
> turn on the pref "devtools.remote.wifi.scan" to true and trigger wifi
> scanning. So the user will need to click on the button only once (and see
> the popup). Then opening the popup again will trigger the scanning
> automatically, with no popup.
> 
> Does that make sense?
> 
> If we use this pref (devtools.remote.wifi.scan) we will need another pref to
> hide the button too.

Yes, this sounds great!  We can use the pref "devtools.remote.wifi.visible" as the new pref to control whether UI is visible at all.  This is already used today on b2g for this purpose[1].

[1]: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/b2g-inbound/diff/06a1ebb05c63/modules/libpref/src/init/all.js

Comment 4

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

In bug 1090535, we would add a Windows Firewall whitelist entry in the installer, which should take care of this issue (though perhaps only for new installs).

Comment 5

[Julian Descottes [:jdescottes]]

About:debugging bug triage. Filter on TRIAGE-JD201705

Temporarily setting P3 to bugs migrated from webide to cleanup the triage for about:debugging.